Burning the Interface Mike Leggett Master of Fine Arts (Honours) (MFA) 1999 Burning the Interface
Artists’ Interactive Multimedia 1992-1998
Mike Leggett
Thesis for examination as Master of Fine Art (Honours) 1999
College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales Contents
Part One : Preface 5
Part Two : Artists’ Interactive Multimedia: Introduction 8 Context: narration, description and interaction 9 Jurassic Multimedia 10 Recap 10 “Before your very eyes!” 11 A pause..... 12 New Tools 13 New Images 14 The Public Domain 17 Notes to Part Two 18
Part Three : Burning the Interface
Part Four : Four Reviews - CD-ROM and the WWW 35 Four Reviews: 36 FAMILY FILES by Mari Soppela 37 PLANET OF NOISE by Brad Miller and Mackenzie Wark 40 WAXWEB by David Blair BEYOND by Zoe Beloff 50 Notes for Part Four 53
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 3 Part Five : Electronic Space & Public Space: Museums, Galleries and Digital Media 55 New Spaces 56 Old Spaces 57 “Please Touch the Exhibits” - Interactions 57 Curations 59 Knowledges 61 Media Formats 65 Practices 67 Exhibition Formats 69 Strategies 70 Conclusions 71 Notes for Part Five 73
Part Six : SonteL - interactive CD-ROM prototype 75
SonteL 77 Proposal 78 Production 79 Completion 80 Finally 83 Notes for Part Six 83
Appendix A - Filmography 84
Appendix B - Strangers on the Land (Working Title) 86
Appendix C - PathScape - pathways through an Australian Landscape 95
Appendix D - Curriculum Vitae 106
Bibliography 113
Published Articles and Papers 116
Illustrations 118
Acknowledgments 121
Index 122
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 4 Part One: Preface
Form and Content have characterised the central obsession of artists at work in the 20th Century. Certainly, if I was to describe my central aesthetic obsession and those of my closest working friends, associates and colleagues in three words, these would be the three words to use. Though not an aesthetic exclusive to this century, the workers on the modernist project who climbed aboard as the century began, alight, as it were, as we reach its end.
To describe the experience of applying this aesthetic to the process of making work, and thinking about making work, and thinking about how any work is presented to and received by others, presents its own prob- lems. How to find a form that suits the expression.
A statement could use the narrative form and the first person singular and begin on the first day of life, or first day of school, or college, as a student, as a teacher, as an artist. Hacking into the substance of what seems important about the topic of interactive multimedia could also use the narrative form and construct that comforting umbilical tube that moves its nourishment - “starting at A, through K, to Z”.
But such a monocular viewpoint is not how the world is encountered and is certainly not adequate to describe my research into interactive multi- media and the way in which it has been used by artists as a medium of expression. There are too many complex relationships. The narrative descriptive form, the thesis, with an introduction, a middle and a con- clusion for instance, has a tendency towards over simplifying the re- search process as well as the reception of an understanding of outcomes from the project. The very act of ordering these words is unrelated to the temporal sequence in which phases and details occurred. The choice of words and the whole technology of language as a reductive process is not the most appropriate for conveying the complexity of another itera- tive technology, especially one that in these early days of its definition and development, finding both material and poetic form.
The proposal initially was to deliver this thesis in hypertext form. Much of the research process had included the writing of journal and magazine articles - the act of linking one document with another in hypertext form would have mirrored for the reader the genesis and the detail of that process.
The crux of a hypertextual navigation method is that different routes are plotted through the same resource material accumulated during the process of the project. The thesis is both the subjective viewpoint and
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 5 the subjective object prepared from an objective perspective. It is also the resource material, the documents and artefacts that have been assembled, which remain open to other uses and interpretations. Mean- ing and meaning-making as an open and transparent construction.
Whilst libraries and archives have yet to establish methods, standards and protocols for accommodating electronic hypermedia, the thesis component of this research project is delivered, notwithstanding, in this book form of conventions, and while offering a kind of ‘random access’ cannot possess the dynamic elements of hypermedia and aspects of multimedia accessible using Web browsers and the Internet.
The convention that a thesis should present an argument, or develop an aspect of the discourse surrounding a particular topic, is well estab- lished but in this form of delivery becomes an oxymoron. It is due in no small part to the technologies developed as part or at least in parallel to the events of the recent past given over to the pursuit of ‘reason’. The book, the pamphlet, the essay, the journal etc, construed ‘the argument’ as the form most fitting for the construction of the proposition, its logical and linear conduct, its cool and serene conclusion. Leading onto another custom, the quaintly named ‘defence’ of contentious arguments. Here is a term that places the activity clearly within the age of technol- ogy that was dominated by the cannon and the circle of wagons, and the spirit of an age dominated by the spectacle of the adversarial lawyer charged with testosterone, deep in the heat of the thrust and parry of debate. Whilst such an approach, kept in place by hierarchies and codexs inherited from another era may have been appropriate for the age of military adventures both on and off the page, it is clearly inap- propriate for the investigation of the humanities and the visual arts.
Contrary to the Homeric oral tradition, the form remains locked into a material state that enabled blocks of discourse to not only be advanced but also be archived, and thus preserve the certainty of the empirical project.
As Darren Tofts has observed: “...writing is effectively a technology of the inventory, suited to the construction of lists, catalogues and archives. In this way, writing contributed to the formation of our modern, humanistic understanding of the individual as solitary, originating centre of con- sciousness, for lists introduced new values of impersonal objectivity and scientific detachment from the world.” (Tofts & McKeich 1998)
This thesis then recognises the confines of the form described above. Whilst possessing taxonomic features it follows the rational path of the report, rather than the often more revealing happenstance of the aleatoric. It also presents speculation, rather than advancing tactical
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 6 argument, in the face of a technology base which besides being expen- sive to work with is a chimera and prone to the vicissitudes of specula- tive financial investment.
Part One, the Preface, and Part Two, the Introduction, provides context for the research and brings the reader to the juncture at which the core of this report in Part Three was initiated, the point at which, with both trepidation and encouragement from my first supervisor, the media artist Bill Seaman, and with the endorsement of the Head of School, Professor Liz Ashburn, I commenced on the research that led to the exhibition in early 1996, Burning the Interface
Part Four examines in some detail four published artists’ work on CD- ROM, three of which are more recent than the curatorial research for the exhibition, which was completed by the beginning of 1995. Part Five surveys the range of practice by artists working with digital media and the opportunities for exhibition in the public spaces of museums, galler- ies and the street, and advances scenarios for correcting the laxity of response by the exhibiting institutions to the vigour with which Austral- ian artists have represented their work and ideas in international forums.
Part Six has the dual function of on the one hand, closing the written thesis with some conclusions about ‘interactive multimedia’ and its current usefulness as an art medium to the artist, and on the other, as an introduction to the studio practice component of this MFA submis- sion. This takes the form of a prototype ‘experimental’ version of an interactive CD-ROM, a copy of which is contained in a pocket at the rear of this binding.
Finally, in returning to the notion of hyperlinking, an anecdote that might help illuminate the gap between the practitioners and the institu- tions responsible for delivering them to audiences. It concerns an Alogonquin guide in a remote area of northern Canada who, when his non-indigenous surveyor companion turned to him and said, “We’re lost”, responded by saying: “We’re not lost, the camp is lost.” (Kerckhove 1995)
Space in the context of this research is the infinite dimension of the contemporary electronic culture. Institutions and individuals are specta- tors and participants in this culture and need to be active in defining the ‘information’ spaces being opened up from within the culture of word technology, as primary centres of experience. The artist is very often the first to describe a new primary experience. It requires no defence, simply the resources for further description.
Mike Leggett June 1999
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 7 Part Two : Introduction Artists’ Interactive Multimedia
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 8 ARTISTS’ INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA
PREFACE Why interactive multimedia (IMM) as a research topic? What is the personal context for this departure?
Context: narration, description and interaction Many years ago I received a vocational training as a photographer - later I specialised in cinematography. Soon after I worked as an editor, organising the film other people had shot, processed and printed - in the film and television industries an employee worked in a particular department1. The aesthetic confinement and the culture of deadmen’s shoes moved me as inexorably as a lacing path2 towards a group of film- artists gathering around the London Arts Lab in Drury Lane. The London Film-makers Co-op (LFMC) was established in 1967 and in 1969 relocated near to the Euston Road. We purchased obsolete processing and printing machinery and thereby gained access to the complete production process. We organised a cinema, publicity and an education program. We set-up a catalogue and a distribution network. We took control of the entire process.
This was after all, the late 60s. And the end of cinema had been announced. 1a The arrival of non-broadcast industrial gauge video in the market place coincided with the advent of media studies in tertiary education - the extension of universal franchise through the democracy of the people’s medium, television. The high capital cost of video equipment with low running costs (compared to film) addressed the cost of working with 16mm film in the art college environment where many of us were by now employed. Video as a capital item also looked better on the college secretary’s books.
Speaking as a practitioner, it’s moments like these that I am confronted with the risibility of the ‘new technologies’....
The computer arrived in the video editing suite in the early 80s and prescribed the process of combining picture and sound images for television.... it was a bit like playing trains in a shunting yard. When it came to doing the Final edit for broadcast television, numerical timecode dominated the process. The cost of hiring the technol- ogy by the hour was so prohibitive that when the Final tape for transmission finally matched the Working tape, within budget, then the producer was considered lucky.
Those of us who had been keeping an eye on the creative and meaning-making possi- bilities of the computer since the early 70s, had always been daunted by the technol- ogy with which it was associated - and its cost, and the complexity of the meta-
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 9 language. The multimedia computer of the past few years is now being marketed in a way reminiscent to that used for the selling of domestic video - as a universal enfran- chiser. National suffrage that has given us, Australia’s Funniest Home Video Show3. Purchasing the multimedia computer does however, promise to strip away the incanta- tions of a generation of programmers who have required of us until recently, to recite various command line liturgies. But in terms of computer useability, progress is at the rate that the market place commands and the tendency towards the stonemason’s craft and its associated hieroglyphic codes will remain with us, particularly if there is some- thing unusual to be done like making art. Unusual in that the codes that need to be written, or software interfaces designed for lacemakers4, need to be manipulated in a way often contrary to the codes of social interplay and interaction.
Jurassic Multimedia Towards the end of the 1970s I had devised a form for presenting what I had been working with since the early 1960s in film, photographic and video production, both as an artist and as an artisan/technician. The form involved the organisation of films, (16mm and 8mm), videotapes, sound tapes and slide projection into a suitably equipped studio or gallery able to reproduce into the space the contents of these various artefacts. The Content then, was not only contained within the artefacts but also with 1b the act of presentation. The technology, the apparatus present in the room was as significant as my presence. I was the ringmaster, or director, or bensai,5 or fairground barker, standing out there in the space rather than, as had become the custom amongst many film-makers, to stand behind whirling projectors or remain hidden in the biobox. I would be equipped with various prepared texts, some on paper, some on sound cassette, and each ‘lecture presentation’6 would not only show ‘the work’, but also provide some background to which it was tangentially related. These would be political in character, about ‘social’ or ‘technical’ or ‘aesthetic’ issues rather than interpretation or anecdotes about ‘the work’ being exhibited. Alongside the ‘contextual’ material presented, content and the form of its (re)presentation was dealt with in the discussion that followed.
Recap The form had been devised in response to a clear lack of understanding of what the artwork was ‘about’ amongst many audiences. The form had followed my involvement with a complex discourse that developed during the ’70s around theories on represen- tation, and the nature of the diegetic space. The tortuous polemical process and the seemingly unrelated works for galleries, cinema and television that emerged from participants in that process, needed some integration!7
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 10 During the early development of ‘avant-garde’, (‘experimental’, ‘underground’, ‘alternative’) film practice in Britain in the mid to late 60s, some of the artists and film-makers8 had developed an approach to film projection as a separate area of formal research, (referred to as ‘expanded cin- ema’)9, whereby multiple use of projectors run- ning film that had been specially shot for each configuration became ‘the piece’, the event.
Almost in opposition to such formal pursuits, a different group of writers and film-makers began to ‘deconstruct’ the narrative edifice of cinema, particularly as it was encountered by the mass audiences for Hollywood film and nightly televi- sion. The term ‘deconstructed film’ emerged out of the essentially academic pursuit of deconstructing, or analysing ‘classic’ narrative cinema. Inflected by the films from the 1960s of Jean-Luc Godard10, and the pre-War work and writings of Bertolt Brecht, this was a form which, with some exceptions11, resulted in works which 3 took Brecht’s ‘alienation’ theory off the stage and placed it in the lap of each audience member to juggle meaning from a melange of no plot, no character, much statement, elliptical sequence and partially referenced ‘the cinematic apparatus’. The frustrations of audiences with this earnest and portentous oeuvre restricted its usefulness to select seminar groups for a period of only a few years.
However, the polemical process of working through these diversions and blind-alleys was, as has to be claimed, productive. Whilst my own film-making practice12 had iden- tified with the extension of the modernist project I was more concerned and aware of audience expectations than many of my friends and colleagues seemed. They were content to regard themselves simply as artists who, by established tradition13, did not concern themselves too much with what people would feel about their work, still less what they may understand by it. My concern was to demonstrate, in an almost Brechtian sense, where it was this work came from, not only as an aesthetic practice but also as the result of a broader set of industrial, social and political circumstances.
“Before your very eyes!” The great advantage of presenting time-based artwork as a lecture presentation,14 (besides providing contextual material for a viewing of the work), was that it enabled flexibility in the order of presentation, and how it should be timed and paced. Taking cues from the audience and utilising certain elements of stagecraft it enabled the reception of the work to occur in a setting probably not dissimilar to that experienced by patrons of early cinema whereby the skills and persuasion of the kinematographic host (often the manager of the show or its projectionist), were incorporated into the cinematographic exposition as an element of reassurance as much for purposes of edification and improvement. 15
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 11 At play in these events were several elements that are most pertinent to an under- standing and appreciation of human intercourse and the incursion into ‘the everyday’16 of the metaphysical.
The place is a lecture theatre, gallery space, cinema, a large room. It is familiar either through habit (as for a student), or convention (a night at the flicks). It is a space formally recognised as a receiving place, where the activity is one of consumption,17 sometimes distanced and critical examination. However, the Content that is normally encountered in these spaces is fairly predictable in its delivery, and what it asks of you the audience: “It is a lecture - listen and watch and remember” “It is a painting - enjoy (or examine and consider)” “It is a movie - what happens at the end?” “It is a large room - who’s that over there and what are they saying?” Your position, your presence is protected. Watch and remember”
When entering the ill-defined space of promenade or epic theatre, your presence is not protected. The over-defined space of a proscenium arch, framing the words and actions of a Beckett play for instance, do not cater for you either. These are spaces in which not a lot happens unless you interact with a process that opens the faculties, espe- cially that of thought, to the collisions that are occurring between disparate events and words. This can be hard work, this can be demanding, this can even be dispiriting. This may not lead to resolution.
This has always seemed to me to be a very productive space in which to be. Even working in the 70s and 80s with somewhat clunky resources, when there was the opportunity or circumstances, this sense of collision with other people through the use of these media tools, was energising. Not only by what occurred with each audience at each performance, but also through what would emerge in discussion. This interactive process was a palpable feature that would lead to new thoughts and new artwork.
A pause..... As much my response to meeting my life partner and the arrival of our first child as it was to the effects of a Conservative political backlash in Britain which blighted so many bright initiatives.
In 1988, upon arrival in Australia, it became necessary to begin to use the computer as a tool. Initially just to make staying in touch with all those friends and relatives back in England at all possible. A little later this led to earning a living from my fascination with what this technology could achieve and what it had by way of potential.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 12 New Tools In Australia in the early 90s we were fortunate in having a far sighted and imaginative group of individuals passing through the Australian Film Commission, both as employ- ees and applicants for funds, together with various international itinerants who arrived to settle or reside. Film and television producers, and artists from a range of back- grounds were encouraged to explore the potential of computer-mediated production. In the early 90s most film, video and television producers were too busy adjusting to the shifts occurring in the national and international market places to be very inter- ested in the potential of anything except their current project.
Visual artists had however, established a rugged reputation as utilisers of both indus- trial and domestic of film and video technology to do what was necessary, with scant regard to conventional economies. The film-makers, following early experiments in the early ‘60s, were well established in the ‘70s with production, distribution and exhibi- tion facilities in each of the state capitals. The federal political changes at that time created an upsurge in the demand from geographical communities for access to televi- sion, and studios with video equipment were likewise established. The intermingling of these two communities led to fruitful collaborations, one of which was a line in video art production which secured its own following, similar to that which the film-makers had already achieved.
Groups dedicated to the promotion and exhibition of this work, from Australia and overseas, developed in each of the major capitals: Modern Image Makers Association (later Experimenta) in Melbourne, Sydney Intermedia Network (later dLux Media Arts) in Sydney, Metro Arts in Brisbane, the Film & TV Institute in Perth and the Media Resource Centre in Adelaide.18
This formation of active and informed artists and audience alike were open to new developments and new technologies, and it was from within that many initiatives emerged to infect both government and private institutions into strategies for funding and audience development.19
The New Image Research fund at the AFC was an early initiative 20 that encouraged some initial steps and enabled others to travel overseas to see work. Besides returning with news of what was being attempted, some returned with the confidence to mount the three-day Third International Symposium of Electronic Art (TISEA) exhibition and conference, organised by the Australian Network for Art & Technology (ANAT) in Syd- ney during 1992.
The event was an extraordinary event for focussing many peoples’ vague knowledge of, and hopes for, computer-mediated work. It was the point from which several important artworks were commenced21 and it was the point at which people used the terms multimedia and internet to begin to name the intersections they were passing through.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 13 My own research began shortly after this event in the Computer Research Laboratory at the College of Fine Arts in the University of New South Wales. The Lab was well equipped at the time with top of the line Macintosh computers and software. The tools available included: Macintosh Quadra computers, Photoshop, Director and Premiere. CD-ROM peripherals were available, mainly for text-based reference works, but the range of titles available for CD-ROM were increasing and by mid-1994, Myst22 had defined the fine art of game play.
This was also the year of the first AFC Multimedia Conference: the Film-maker and Multimedia.23 If there was any doubt as to what constituted multimedia, Australians were not going to be allowed to forget it during 1994, nor the time of each of the AFC events that followed annually, and the plethora of less cerebral ‘market-drive’ events likewise, notwithstanding the infamous Department of Communications and the Arts Multimedia Forums.24
New Images “The making of new images? From where do they arise, by what processes? Is the prod- uct of process simply imagistic - images for their own sake, or rather, the sake of cap- tured audiences - or can they have meaning which is guided rather than directed, and function to elucidate and navigate ‘what is on the tip of the tongue’”?25
Simon Penny observes (Penny 1994): “Making art that has relevance to contemporary technological contexts is an exercise fraught with obstacles, not the least being the pace of technological change itself. In order to produce an artwork with any (kind of) technology, the technology must be considered in its cultural context, in the way it functions in human culture, and the type of relationship that it can have with an artist and with a creative process. These things take time.”
It is asked: can the speed at which new software and hardware products are shipped, new services and add-ons are provided, can this rate of replacement of tools with which to work, distort reflection upon the outcomes of that creative process from the artist’s viewpoint? Is the current gap between realising images and their critical examination contributing images which are not, of society but are, of tools? Are the new images we have been making simply, about tools?
As the Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa has observed by raising issues of the political control of cultural dissemination, and in defence of traditional tools; “No great literary work erases or impoverishes one which appeared 10 centuries ago”.26
I would suggest that our project is not about by-passing useful artefacts. The process is about responding to conditions that emerge for the exhibition, (and so production), of images and media, including the written word in general. The process is about the invention of new images: • for the sake of exploring the potential of a tool; • countering negative and banal use, through its purely commercial exploita- tion;
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 14 • more important, inventing systems within the technology which, in spite of, rather than because of the artist’s determinations, reveal the images we are seeking in a way only possible with a particular medium? And anyway, when have we ever been able to resist new tools? Is it not an innate condition with which we have to cope?
As the three figures in Simon Penny’s zone triggered installation, Point of Sale (1992), enunciate, 27 (among other things): “protect your image; your image is your property; you are being watched; you are being judged;”
Between paranoia of ‘the new’ and celebration of the novel, we are left wondering, Which direction to navigate? What strategy is best adopted?
Cyberflesh Girlmonster(1995), according to the writer Vicky Riley (Riley 1995) “has evaded the narcissistic ‘designing a new and better imaginary space’ which pollutes just about every artistic strategy behind Australian interactive electronic art”. She continues, “What is wholly interesting and significant about Linda Dement’s work is that there appears to be no strategy and no narrative...... she is not interested in charac- ters cute or fierce, nor concerned with uto- 3. pian notions of subverting some imaginary 3 mass media technocracy, gender specific or otherwise.” Later Riley observes that “For girls of Dement’s generation...it is entirely effortless and necessary to include into one’s art practice a healthy disregard or disinter- est in the politics of representation, or affirmative narratives, which characterise feminist art from the prior two generations.”
So for those seeking navigational aids we are between the sailor’s analogue lamps and the aeroplane pilot’s digital radio beacon. Some users are equipped to be guided by both systems, but the ‘real politik’ of access to the images, both on-line and off-line is often regarded with equal disdain by artists and corporate entity alike.
At a demonstration in 1995 of the initial manifestations of the World Wide Web to a meeting of museologists, many began to leave early - “..old hat - seen this...” It was clear that they were on-line, the rest of the world was not their problem. The demon- strator meanwhile toured the sites devoted to matters of museums and art, of which there were, (even by then with the Web only two years old),several hundred around the world, most of which had wheeled out images from their collections in the previous 12 months.
The WWW seemed to me then as now to be about the possibility of a return to some- thing of an oral culture, (richly permeated and inflected by images), after years of tyranny from the written word, as exemplified by the text-based, Unix and Internet thing.....
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 15 The precept had been established amongst that 5% elite. That session was squandered in mutual self-congratulation. No strategy was discussed for expanding the network, for extending that copper wire. The day before it had been announced that, following the takeover of the responsibility for running Aartnet28 by Telstra, all commercial traffic would be moved off Australia’s part of the Internet and presented to a new service provider, Australia Online - read Microsoft - that was an unfortunate style of the (Keating) federal government. My point is that this roomful of museum people had much to gain from lobbying, as the Broadband Services Group has done in its final report, for Aarnet to become the university and community network, to include all aspects of our ‘non-commercial’ culture. When a structure can be planned that will address the need from all citizens to access and navigate, then the notion of the interactive image takes on meanings way beyond our current modest beginnings. Yes, “These things take time” - but there’s no time like the present.
“Interactivity that merits its name”, according to John Conomos (Conomos 1994), “is more about self-directed creativity, connectivity and transformability than using the computer-screen interface as a means of reconsolidating the logocentric, masculinist and technophiliac features of Western representation.” He also raises two questions for the potential interactive multimedia artist: “Why am I using this particular media technol- ogy? What advantages does interactivity offer me not already evident in other relevant media?” Citing Simon Penny he asks, “Do the interactive technologies represent old ideas in new boxes?”
Some of these questions are addressed in the body of this thesis, some will have to wait for later. To conclude this Introduction however, I cannot resist identifying to some degree with those artists who would describe their project as being about the ineffable - that which cannot be expressed in words.
At Performance Space gallery in Sydney during February 1994 I encountered Brad Miller’s Digital Rhizome (1994) which seemed to demonstrate more clearly than anything else I had encountered to that point what it was that made multimedia and hyperlinking worthy of serious consideration as a medium of artistic expression. Though running off the hard disc of the Quadra on the wooden table sitting on the wooden floorboards, the piece was destined for duplication on CD-ROM. It was this fact that completed the production cycle, moving the work out of the artist’s studio and the art gallery and into the public domain. 4
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 16 The Public Domain At this point in my research into the production of IMM, it became clear that work which had been completed by other artists using the tools with which I was experi- menting were, with the notable exclusion of the above mentioned work, not much in evidence. It would surely save much time and reinvention if the creative and by defini- tion, exploratory outcomes of this work could be made public.
In early 1994 I prepared a description of what an exhibition of artists’ CD-ROM might entail and with the support of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) I approached the Australian Film Commission (AFC) for a modest grant to research the area. This enabled me to buy the time to initiate the Call for Proposals and then follow-up the considerable response that followed, mostly via access to the Internet through the research that was then developed at the Research Lab. There was between 5-600 enquires which produced 130 pieces of work from which a short list of about 50 were selected.29
The MCA were “pleasantly surprised” at the quality of the work, allocated an opening date and raised their initial stated involvement from a single gallery space to three gallery spaces. From that point on I worked with Linda Michael, one of the MCA’s most experienced curators, to develop the show and the catalogue and work with the 29 discs in the final selection.30
The research mushroomed into parts of the subject that I had not anticipated but has enabled me to see a large amount of work, attend many events and of course, think, write and generally respond to the work. Besides informing the thoughts and plans I had for making work of my own, this was also to lead into an area of creative practice with which in the past, in the mueum and gallery context, I had only partial experi- ence - curation and exhibition design.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 17 Notes to Part Two: Introduction
1 Camera; sound; editing; printing; processing; set-building; writing; projecting, etc 2 As Inexorably as a Lacing Path was the title of a book review I submitted to the ACTT Journal (the periodical for the Association of Cinematographic and Television Technicians, the British film & television trade union) in 1969. The book (Walter 1969) was intended as a handbook for the film editor and was critiqued for its compartmentalised approach to creative activity and ‘the industrialisation of aesthetic choice’ at a time - this was the late 60s - when such models were under attack, particularly from artists. The dialectic that developed in the 70s began to develop a divergence between cinema and ‘artists’ films’. 3 Australia’s Funniest Home Video Show: Channel 9, Sydney - a popular mid-evening television program series, based on and using some material from the North American version, which invited people to send in the tapes they had shot of amusing domestic recordings, usually of the slapstick, “Owww, that hurt” variety. Prizes were awarded for the most popular contributions. 4 The popular multimedia authoring tool Macromedia Director used the metaphor of a Stage for organising all the objects that might be required on the computer screen at any one time. This was achieved by placing the objects onto a plan view diagram (based on film industry dubbing charts) consisting of many parallel channels. The visual effect of this on the average size 14 inch screen was a criss-cross of tiny boxes, colours and shapes, rather like lace or embroidery. 5 To the Distant Observer (Burch 1979) is an excellent description of how cinema can so successfully make radically different cultures and cultural in- scription available across cultures given a basic pre-knowledge of Japanese tradition. 6 There were two, Image ConText One (1978) and Image ConText Two (1982) Videotape versions were made in 1984 and 1985 - see Appendix A and D. 7 Another term from the period, ‘integrated film practice’, referred not to theory and practice but to a closer working connection between production, distribution, exhibition and education (marketing), processes that were nor- mally compartmentalised in the industrial model of the commercial film indus- try. (Harvey 1978) (Burch 1973) 8 Centred on the London Film-Makers’ Co-op. With Malcolm Legrice (Legrice 1977) and several others, I helped develop in 1969, the first of the workshop facilities at the Robert Street Arts Lab, which grew out of the Drury Lane Arts Lab where David Curtis had established the screening program (Curtis 1971). Over the following years the workshop, cinema and distribution office moved from ‘licenced squat’ to ‘surplus building’ - about three sites in a five year period. After a long stay at the Gloucester Road site near Chalk Farm, the Co- op (and many other impoverished arts organisations), were rehoused with ‘Lottery money’. Along with London Electronic Arts, the Co-op now shares customised premises in Hoxton Square. 9 The term, ‘expanded cinema’ had a different meaning in the USA (as many things do), following the appearance of book of the same name, (Youngblood 1970) which used the term ‘expanded’ in the same sense as Tonto’s Expanded Headband - farrr rout!
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 18 10 Jean-Luc Godard had more or less ceased production at the beginning of the 70s. By the 1980s he was working on a daily basis with videotape from a studio he had established on the French Swiss border, between two worlds, from where he completed the revealing series of TV programs, France Tour Detour Deux Enfants. 11 The film Goldiggers by Sally Potter; and Because I Am King by Stewart McKinnon. 12 Filmography - Mike Leggett : see Appendix A. 13 This was the late-60s and many of the film-makers came from art school backgrounds where such disinterest, not to say cynicism was encouraged. This began to change with the re-organisation of the art schools following ‘les evenements’ that impacted most of them during 1968, with the adoption of a more open means of attaining a tertiary qualification than existed through the National Diploma in Art & Design (NDAD) system. 14 The first version of Image Con Text: One was presented at Exeter College of Art in a weekly college forum designed for lectures to show and talk about their professional practice, (for which full-time staff at that point in time received leave of absence of one day per week.) The presentation lasted about 60 minutes and led to such animated discussion that the College Vice Principal who hosted the event requested that the discussion, which had lasted one hour, be continued at the same time in the following week. In an institution without much of a reputation for critical or theoretical discourse, it was of great surprise and some delight that the theatre was again filled a week later for a further two hours of discussion. 15 Something of this experience was covered in the Dawn of Cinema Confer- ence (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1996), a report about which I wrote for RealTime /15 ‘Past Presence’ 16 The Cinema of the Everyday was the title of a weekend workshop held at the Dartington Arts Centre,Devon 1982 by the film and television department of South West Arts. (South West Film Directory 1980) 17 The term consumption is understood here to include both the delight of rapturous intake, often to excess, as well as definition from the proto-econo- mist Karl Marx when describing the end of the life cycle of the industrial manu- facture of Goods and Products. 18 I have found the histories of Australian alternative, underground film, video centres in the contemporary development of screen culture very usefully cov- ered in (Thoms 1978), (Mudie 1997) and (Wark 1997). 19 The early stages of this development is well covered in Continuum V8 No1 1994 20 Gary Warner introduced the New Image Research program into the Australian Film Commission range of project support ventures in 1989, a move which was to have a profound effect and gave Australian artists a head-start on their international colleagues. Michael Hill continued supervising this imaginative program in 1993 when Gary went to develop innovative audio-visual features at the new Museum of Sydney, employing many artists in the development of the exhibit. 21 Bill Seaman’s The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers(1994) 22 Article (Leggett 1994b) 23 Report (Leggett 1994a)
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 19 24 The Federal government through the Dept of Communication and the Arts took the initiative of staging informational and ‘talent linking’ events around the country during 1996 which were marred by the inability of the bureaucrats to conceive of multimedia as anything but a meeting of com- puting and television. 25 From an Introduction by Mike Leggett to a New Media Forum session, Is It Time for a New Image?, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, June 1995. 26 Sydney Morning Herald - Freedom and Literature - 13.9.1993 27 (Penny 1994) op.cit 28 AARNet was the universities administered computer network (Internet) administrative body in Australia. 29 This process is described in Artlines No. 1/4 1996 30 Refer to the exhibition catalogue for more on this.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 20 Part Three Burning the Interface
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 21 BURNING THE INTERFACE
Art and the Computer - the Cumbersome Tool Since the 1940s visual artists have used the computer as a tool to perform more quickly the often mundane task of making something visible. Designers and architects have had much experience with computer-aided-design (CAD) software capable of producing drawings which can incorporate design changes and thus save hours of repetitive re-drawing. The publishing, printing and pre-press industries have been central to developing the word-processing, desktop publishing and photo-manipulation software, initially to make their businesses more competitive. Today, that software is so ubiquitous it has led to business opportunities not previously envisaged.
The ability of the computing apparatus to respond flexibly and rapidly to changes in a project, in a multitude of work applications, is a result of the design intuitions of artists skilled in the use of tools, combining with the computer scientists’ ability to develop tools.
Multimedia During the mid-1990s the three words, Form and Content, were modified to read Multi- media and Content.
Multimedia was the term taken up by the computer industry to describe the ‘conver- gence’ of computer applications until then kept distinct: software applications for word processing, desktop publishing, graphic production, photo manipulation, sound pro- duction and editing, video production, manipulation and editing etc. Image and graphic files, text, sound and movie files are capable of becoming source objects able to be combined using authoring applications that generate a single file. These offer interactive options for moving through the otherwise disparate material - the Content. Though the file formats stay distinct, authoring applications enable their apparent convergence.
Many, including Colin Mercer at the Griffith Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy, have reflected upon the marginalisation that the more creative communities have been forced into by the majority of authoring application producers and distributors pursu- ing industry and training objectives. “Interactive multimedia offers a chance to break down a whole series of barriers between genres, disciplines and artforms. Convergence of mind-sets, not just technologies is the issue,” according to Mercer, “with the ability to think laterally and more creatively”.1
The multimedia computer however, has achieved a greater degree of useability amongst the population than was ever possible with earlier ‘user-friendly’ models. By concealing the computer programming code beneath the graphical user interface (GUI), the arcane languages of a generation of programmers, the modern day equiva- lent of the stonemason’s hieroglyphics, have been replaced by the drag-and-drop of the mouse jockey.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 22 The computer industry by developing these tools for production, designed for specialist users rather than programmers, offer artists at the production stage, independence from profit-making orientated facility houses. Indeed the artist’s approach to using these tools has often revealed shortcomings as well indicating lines of fresh feature development for the manufacturers.2 However, a knowledge of the number of craft skills required of an individual are considerable. To make a multimedia production the skills required include: photographer, film/video camera operator, lighting director, graphic designer, writer, picture and sound editor, typographer, sound recordist, com- puter programmer and line producer. While some artists are capable of undertaking all these skills to a high professional standard, most restrict their expertise to a few and work within their limitations, or go out and raise a budget to be able to pay for the expertise required.3
Within the model worlds developed by a handful of artists using these tools, has been illuminated the significant difference between video art and multimedia art - the option to guide or navigate an order and duration of events not necessarily pre-deter- mined by the artist. It is not an exaggeration when it comes to describing some of the works by some artists that the resulting interaction can be cathedral-like in their complexity:- blocks of images, movies, sounds and texts, assembled complete with nave, transept, choir, chapels and chapter house; and of course crypt (not to say dungeons).
Such constructs are not attempted unless the foundations are solid. Though the soft- ware interfaces that have been designed between the computer and the artist has removed the necessity, if not the need, to be able to program in code, the complex set of options that are nonetheless presented to the artist through the menu structures employed in production software applications, require a considerable amount of time to be expended just to learn interactive authoring software. As ideas are developed and begin to gel, the computer itself will constantly rely on the accurate reproduction of a digital stream generated by the software.
At complex levels of computer data management, (another way of saying multimedia), it is not only the time invested by the artist that is at stake but that of the audience too. The machine system must be able to reproduce accurately the instructions used by the computer for the execution of a design or sequence of visual and sound events. One bit out of place on the fresco might not be missed but something missing from the crownstone could bring the lot crashing down.
To prevent a crash in computing jargon, requires well designed software running smoothly through random access memory (RAM) from the memory store of the mag- netic disc or the CD-ROM (Compact Disc - Read Only Memory). The CD-ROM primarily has more stable attributes than the memory storage devices normally linked to the computer’s processor, such as floppy and hard discs, cartridges, Digital Audio Tape etc. as magnetic media are highly subject to interference both electro-magnetic and physi- cal.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 23 By 1993, there were various manufacturers marketing desktop CD-ROM burners capable of making an individual disc, a desktop technology initially intended for the archiv- ing of company accounts and records. Besides attracting commerce of course, the technology also attracted the attention of artists.
This medium of storage could be said to mirror the impact of the arrival of bronze casting on the development of the art object - plasticity and permanence.
CD-ROM - the 21st Century Bronze? 3
Desktop CD-ROM burners capable of making 5 individual (‘gold’) discs has attracted the attention of visual artists and created the opportunity for multimedia artists to make their work more widely available, either in published editions or as single, one-off ‘gold disc, artist’s proofs’.
This chapter considers the range of strategies employed by the artists in designing the interface - that intimate space between the image on the monitor screen and the computer user; and some of the issues and ideas raised by the content of the artworks. The interactive and the immersive states of engagement are considered and also some of the innovations achieved by the artists that help to claim the CD-ROM as a storage device for the creative medium known as interactive multimedia.
The electronic medium popular with artists prior to the arrival of the personal compu- ter was the video camera and recorder. Whilst the image from the video camera is an important component of many multimedia works, early work by artists illuminate the significant differences between the image from a computer and the image from a videotape. • the quality of the image on the computer screen is of a higher quality - it is capable of having greater resolution and is able to reproduce colour more accurately; • the computer offers non-linear options for guiding or navigating the order and duration of events - interactive multimedia does not usually have a beginning, middle and an end.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 24 CD-ROM - a Medium Revealed As the availability and viability of CD-ROM as a storage and distribution medium began to be felt, various problems traditionally associated with making computer art were resolved. Quite rapidly the positive characteristics of the new medium emerged:
Plasticity and Permanence The electro-magnetic system of memory storage in computing has made much compu- ter-based work ephemeral and fugitive, often restricting its exhibition potential to one-off installations, or playout through video and film. The archival specifications of CD-ROM can more or less guarantee that a completed work as “art-on-disc” cannot be: • erased, tampered with, or altered;
• duplicated (if the correct safeguards are in place), thus preventing the unauthorised copying of artists work and its illicit commercial exploitation.
CD-ROM also has very good physical properties and archival specifications and there- fore good prospects for financial return to artists through:
• purchase by collections both private and public, of limited editions of a work;
• the editioning of multiple runs for wider distribution by niche publishers;
• the licensing of titles to networks via servers or linked CD-ROM players.
These advantages are capable of giving assurance to the artist concerning the time and material resources invested and offer better prospects for financial compensation than rentals on films and videotapes, or fees for installation.
Cost Effectiveness The cost of transferring computer files from ‘the studio’ (the workstation with hard disc/server) to ‘the gallery’ (the Compact Disc) has been reduced, enabling a relatively low cost of ‘burning’ a copy.5 This can be as little as the cost of a ‘raw’ disc if a ‘burner’ is available. The relatively low cost of making test and ‘artist proof’ editions enables the work to be seen easily by other artists and researchers, curators and publishers. With a world-wide CD pressing industry now established, the cost of producing multi- ples and editions has reduced, further extending the potential for a financial return to the artist.
Independent Production During the early development of the personal computer in the 1970s and 1980s, com- peting companies produced wide variations of computer components (hardware) and the coded instructions necessary to run them (software). The economical Amiga, Commodore and Atari brands were popular with artists during this time, in spite of their crude imaging capacities. Computer labs and commercial companies around the world, using a myriad of other systems, would occasionally grant access to artists to experiment. However, this was usually during unsocial hours, in unsympathetic working conditions, often tolerated by artists with no income or professional support.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 25 Independence had its price. The range of computer systems and standards since then has streamlined. Now it is becoming more common for any single CD-ROM to be read- able on both major but incompatible systems - Macintosh and Windows. Cross-plat- form developers’ software can address 95% of the installed CD-ROM user-base, and has encouraged the artist to invest time and develop production resources.
Developing a studio practice of techniques specific to computer art is greatly aided by CD-ROM. For instance it facilitates the magpie approach of amassing working material. Having converted images, text and/or sound into digital form, artists can catalogue the stuff onto a CD-ROM and use discs as an archive, retrieving to the production computer as and when the need arises; no backups, no maintenance. Working experi- ments and ‘sketches’ can be economically stored for later reference.
Distribution and Exhibition Art produced using computers can be reproduced using home or office equipment connected to a CD-ROM player - in the home or over lunch at the office. The computer- with-CD-ROM-drive-and-modem, or multimedia computer, is the standard computer of the 90s, capable of connection via a phone line to the Internet and other computer networks. It is being marketed in a way reminiscent of the selling of domestic video cameras - for the creation of domestic and personal statements, using instant ‘point and shoot’ technology.
From 1995 onwards, the quantity of World Wide Web (WWW) sites expanded exponentially, continuing to define what the ‘superhighway’ might become, with artists setting the pace for works of imagination and depth. However, the arrival of data from many Web sites is sluggish, particularly where memory hungry images are concerned. For this reason, many regard the Web as primarily a publishing and distribution system with limited potential for fully interactive artworks, at least at the early stages of technical development. The passing of the Internet Classification Bill by the Federal government during 1999 in an attempt to control the availability of certain mostly visual material, increases the problems this channel of dissemination poses to artists.
CD-ROM, by comparison, has to be regarded as the best compromise among computer technologies available to artists, because the full range of multimedia (text, images, movies and so on) is able to fully function. Over the next few years artists will also begin to utilise the new format DVD (Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) which has ten times the amount of storage space as a CD-ROM (and is capable of playing 60 minutes of full-screen movies at a quality of sound and image which exceeds VHS video cassette).
The technology will always be developing, (if not ‘improving’). The works in the exhibi- tion, Burning the Interface
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 26 6 Interface The ‘interface’ is the conventional and pragmatic shorthand to describe the organisa- tion of the screen, keyboard and mouse and enables the user to control the function- ing of the computer. It is a jargon term inherited from computer scientists and the computer trade. However, it is a potent term concealing many meanings and implied meanings.
Interface initially had a technical meaning describing the function: Input/Output, or I/O or put in its more correct and longer form: input-process-output
Terms such as these come about as part of the development process for the technol- ogy, initially functioning as shorthand referents rather than having grammatical accu- racy. In this chicken and egg situation, the sense intended is that in response to output, interaction occurs, resulting in further input, thus initiating a cyclical progres- sion. Input is effected by the computer using the meta-language of computer code, or by the viewer interacting with the highly organised surface of the graphical user interface (GUI). The GUI conceals the computer code which provides instructions to the central processor by substituting images and icons through which interaction with the user occurs. The term ‘desktop’ (adopted by Apple Macintosh computers at an early stage in the development of the personal computer) equates the design of the inter- face with a well-ordered office.4
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 27 The interface paradigm was central to the explorations of artists represented in the Burning the Interface
“What, or more specifically when, is an interface? [The assumption is]... it only exists in the cybernetic domain, when someone sits in front of a pc and clicks a mouse. An interface, on the contrary, is any act of conjunction which results in a new or unexpected event. A door-handle, as Brenda Laurel reminds us, is an interface. So too is the “chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” James Joyce didn’t write books. Marcel Duchamp didn’t create works of art. John Cage didn’t compose music. They created interfaces, instances into which someone, (you), intervened to make choices and judgements that they were not willing to make. ... You are empowered, you are in control. Cough during a John Cage recital and you are part of the performance. That’s an interface.”7
Artists like the three cited above are much less concerned with the details of technol- ogy when it comes to employing the tools that technologists invent, whether a type- writer, a urinal, a piano - or a computer. Tools simply enable the material evidence, the artwork, to be presented to the viewer. The active response of the viewer, either through internal reflection, or a more innate and reflexive external gesture such as physically walking around a three-dimensional object (or coughing during a John Cage performance), completes the meaning of the work. The CD-ROM interface includes a physical link between the viewer and the artwork — the Mouse — making response necessary rather than optional.8
Many works explore the potential of the interface through an interaction process that navigates through the various ‘screen spaces’ that make up the whole work.
Interact / Immerse The terms ‘interactive’ and ‘immersive’ describe the primary responses to the options of progression through an interactive multimedia interface.
Immersion follows a tradition within art history of contemplation, exploring the work through a reflective and cerebral process based on the perceiver’s response to the actions of the artist. Interaction often follows innate responses more closely related to the hunter’s instinct or, in less primitive terms, the existential experience, where reflection is subordinated to action.
Encountering a work’s interface for the first time involves establishing a modus oper- andi: first, find the way in; then determine a system for movement through the work. Finally, discover how to exit, or leave the work! Most works in the Burning the Inter- face exhibition required quite attentive interaction but the actual method of progress- ing through each piece was different. It could be by simply clicking on the image of a labelled button that one was led on to further options. Less obvious opportunities for interaction needed to be determined by trial and error - very often without recourse to rational deduction!
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 28 A Digital Rhizome (1994) by Brad Miller, has been seen extensively around the world. It was the first interactive computer piece I en- countered and the notes I made then I feel apply as a general strat- egy for many other works which place the emphasis on interaction rather than immersion.
Navigating Levels of Meaning The title screen for a work may present multiple options for begin- ning the interactive process. Often no 7 clue is given as to the consequence of making one choice or another. A first level of meaning is thus quickly established - whilst sequence will have signifi- cance, a specified order will not. Hence the narrative encountered will be the unique result of how an individual interacts with the work.
The process of interacting by clicking on images or words is quickly learnt to influence progress, but is recognised as not being a process of ‘control’. This becomes the sec- ond level of meaning.
Now a process commences whereby the interacting subject attempts to delineate the furthest extent of each section of the work, clicking outwards in a conceptual circle, attempting to plot ‘landmark’ images along the way, before returning through the maze to the starting point, to then set out to test the path again before beginning again from another point.
With so little to go on, the ‘mazing’ process itself offers the third level of meaning, as the motivational drive changes into a pleasurable era of reflexivity. Without knowing the consequences of taking options (as opposed to making choices), the form of the exploration is accepted as being purely aleatoric - a result of chance not choice. But the interacting subject’s memory of images, text clusters, button slogans etc., is severely stretched in an effort to map the topography. The work may suddenly subvert a viewer’s imagined game-plan. As mazing continues, ‘control’ is not wrested by the interactor but is at best shared.
A fourth level of meaning comes as the interactor invokes that familiar defuser of subversive strategies - interpretation. On what basis were these images/sounds/texts selected, created and combined? Does the interaction create space in the mind of the viewer to interrogate the images? What is the relationship between the structure of the work and its overt content?
The interactive process can enable us to comprehend the narrative process to which the media often subjects us. We know that constant repetition can render words and images meaningless, but to be in a position to determine for oneself the number of repetitions, returns the formation of meaning to the perceiver.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 29 Probing the Interface (1992 - 1997) A Digital Rhizome (1994) by Brad Miller, uses the mouse click intensively - on but- tons, labelled or unlabelled, and zones, concealed or indicated with an image9. By contrast the anti-button attitude is represented by Urban Feedback (1997) by Sophie Greenfield and Giles Rollestone, where the Mouse is employed as a tool to partici- pate in the making of a work of collage, based on the images and sounds with which we are bombarded everyday with all kinds of media. In addition the button critique was advanced in an early work by Gerald van der Kaap, Blind Rom (1992), and the British work by the SASS group, Anti-ROM (1995), who entertainingly explore the many uses of the Mouse, Clicking and Dragging, or simply Rollingover! 8
The paradigm of the printed book is one interactive format used frequently in early examples of popular retail CD-ROM titles.10 Even the various genres are repeated: the reference book, the tutorial, the travelogue, the biography, the salacious peepshow and the novel. Some artists have experi- mented with these formats. John Colette commences with three options for explor- ing the collected data on his disc 30 Words for the City (1995). A random selection plays a loop of the entire work; the entire work plays in a loop until Quit; or the work can be viewed interactively in ‘a book format’. The clues provided in Colette’s ‘book’ as to ‘content’ are not found through a contents or index page but simply through combining the two processes of interaction and immersion 9 sequentially. Having selected an item, the linking feature particular to interactive multimedia computer work, hyperlinking, takes the ‘reader’ straight to the text, sound and images, without pages to thumb. You select from one of the button images, you watch until the sequence ends, then you decide what to watch next. The equation with a physical book is thus only partial.
Similar processes of interaction and immersion, which function together to produce electronic catalogues of discrete ‘movies’, occur in works such as The Encyclopedia of Clamps (1997) by the group De-Lux’O, a work which like their earlier Barminski - Consumer Product (1994), addresses the absurdities of North American urban exist- ence and its blend of ephemeral cultural activity accessed by a blaze of probing Clicks.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 30 The alchemical age is addressed in similar fashion in ScruTiny in the Great Round (1995) by Jim Gasperini and Tennesee Rice Dixon.
Peter de Lorenzo’s two short pieces, Red Dress and like ice like fire- (1997) like his earlier work, Reflections, Abstractions and Memory Structures (RAMs) (1995) goes to the ‘extreme’ of having interaction re- stricted to ‘go’ and ‘stop’. It has an entirely 10 linear image progression - a videotape on CD-ROM - and thus appeals for the viewer to become wholly immersed with the option of freezing the image in flicker-free suspen- sion before, by clicking again, permitting the piece to inexorably move forward again.
The question of motivation remains - why should I want to interact?
Reflection has been assumed to be the traditional role of the art viewer, but when confronted with the art produced during most of this century the response is more often the reflexive. One stage further on from the ‘reflex’ lies the ‘reaction’. A succes- sion of reflexes produces interaction to the opportunities presented by the artwork. Much of this early work explores this potential, essentially by navigating through the various ‘screen spaces’ that make up the virtual whole. The possibilities this opens up are in opposition to the endless flow of images in contemporary culture. For this is a linear mediascape obsessed, it has often been observed, by sheer quantity of images, (whether picture, sound or text), which through repeated use have lost meaning or become meaningless, are rooted, are in stasis, have become intractable. Interaction, physically as well as psychically, proposes the possi- bility of re-establishing a range of meanings for the interacting subject.
The Tractable Process The established protocols of screen culture are questioned to greater and lesser degree by artists’ IMM work whether it is delivered by CD-ROM or over the Web and the Net. The promise is that there is more to see, (the scopophilic drive), and more to follow (the narrative drive) both propelling the interacting navigator forward. Like multi- channel television, this encourages the obsessive searching for ‘something else’ - 11 ‘clickoritis’ as one observer memorably described it. The possibility of ‘pulling the art apart’ (without damaging it), be- comes a reality when it is placed on the computer. Venetian Deer (1997) by the Ger- man group Die Veteranen, (as in their ear- lier work, Die Veteranan (1995), encourages us to recompose their offerings and even to make images and mix sounds using the tools they provide. Once saved as a file (and if the computer has a suitable internet con-
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 31 nection), these can then be added to the virtual gallery the artists have established on the internet at a site in Germany to which the CD-ROM will automatically take you.
For meaning to be made however, the kind of interaction anticipated by most artist developers, is that which takes risks, with the interacting subject, with the material presented. Exploration and experimentation are the keys to this process, responses which are present in the appreciation of art in history but responses which, until the coming of interactive multimedia, involve a wholly cerebral experience - ‘art of the mind’. Screen culture in particular, as well as other artforms, are prone to suffer from obsessive response and over interpretation.
In tracing points at which meaning is estab- lished, A Digital Rhizome (1994) for in- stance, quotes whole sections from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, both as a clue to this process, and as a theoretical backdrop integrated within the body of the work itself. As an early example of one-on- one interactive multimedia art, the piece successfully illustrates and explores the metaphor of the rhizome of the title: “..not a beginning or an end; it is always in the middle ..”. 11 12
It seems from an initial encounter with A Digital Rhizome (1994), that the element in the piece, the base unit, is the moving image which, as we know, appeals to our in- nate hunter’s eye. Most of the movies it contains reference technology and the tech- nology of war in particular - the hunter’s eye is appropriately served. The mind reels under the weight of mass disseminated paranoia - the brutality of the Age of Print; the callousness of the computer-imaged Gulf War. Does the ability to participate through this interactive piece in ‘choosing’ to steer again the route which will run again the image of Iraqi squaddies running from their vehicles as a missile homes-in, make the event more meaningful in the wider context? Or does it simply reflect, through the computer technology in front of which we sit, the ability to image what previously could only be imagined? Through juxtaposition with images that could only be created by the artist on a computer, is there a dialectic space created to enable us to see a way through such terror?
During the process which I outline above, there is an option of interacting with those ‘one-dimensional’ images grabbed from mediaspace. Whilst it confronts us with what appears to be the conventional image, the process of interaction enables us, through part control, to comprehend the narrative process to which we are subjected by exter- nal agencies, and which is propagated by the Media.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 32 Linda Dement’s Cyberflesh Girlmonster (1995) takes the conventional image of the fragmented female body and re-assembles it to make new images which are both humorous and horrific - sounds and texts underpin brutal social realities. Repulsion and fascination are successfully interrogated likewise through the process of interac- tion.
Celebration of the intimacy of the process is enacted in the classic tome Flora Petrinsularis (1994) of Jean-Louis Boissier, (after Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions), where the smallest of physical movements on the screen are mirrored by a move or a click from the Mouse. This gentle and sensuous corre- spondence, requiring the responding gesture, places the interacting subject clearly in the role of participant, whose absence would simply deny the artist’s 13 work any meaning. Meaning in the sense of experience, since interpretation of the data is not a requirement a priori, of experiencing the work. Here one revels, in the soft sound of a voice merging with the lapping of water, that leads to each encounter with the images of the young woman. The image of each plant the artist collected from the îsle de Saint-Pierre, the place where Rousseau had self-exiled himself, is paired within each of these virtual encounters.
“The hypermedia Flora Petrinsularis is an essay inspired by the [...] temptation to make a book which, if it cannot do without writing, does without the language of words; a book which shows, which offers something to experience but without having anything to say.”12
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 33 Notes for Part Three 1 From an interview that appeared in an article about the Cooperative Multimedia Centres (CMCs). Leggett, Under a Federal Sun? RealTime August 1997. 2 Leggett, Mike 1994, Interactive - a Seminar, Art Master number 3, College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales, Sydney. 3 This option, in Peter Weir’s immortal words about making films in Hollywood, is too much ‘like working in the real estate business...’ 4 This section was first developed as a paper for Intersections95, the annual conference auspiced by the College of Fine Art, UNSW for the purposes of fostering connectedness between artists and scientists. The paper was subsequently published in various forms - see Bibliography - this version is the final version! 5 The process of making a ‘gold’ CD-ROM is very similar in practice to copying computer files from one storage media to another - hard drive to floppy disc for instance - by dragging and dropping the icons or filenames from one window to another. The actual disc is not actually cast with liquid metal but employs a focussed laser beam which penetrates a resin sub-state to literally burn a pattern of pits into the metal beneath. The resulting CD-ROM(R) can then be read by another computer using a focussed beam from a laser to reflect a light pattern that has been modu- lated by the pits. 6 The fraught issue of platform incompatibility between the Apple and Microsoft systems is delt with in detail later in section 4. 7 From paper presented at The Film-maker and Multimedia Conference, (AFC) Melbourne, March 1995; later as an article by Darren Tofts: The Bairdboard Bombardment; 21C #2 1995 8 See more on the tactility of the Mouse in Riley, Vikki 1994, I Touch Myself: Linda Dement’s electronic bodyscapes, Photofile No.44 April 1995. 9 See more under Part Four: Four Reviews. 10 Printed book technology whilst having the hypertext/multimedia feature of random access, (the ability to jump from one part of the text to another), is not able to do so as an integrated part of the designed reception of the text(s), though the initial tendency, whether with CD- ROM or the Web is to compose pages of text and images, and ‘hot spots’ which can be clicked or rolled-over, and then at the bottom of the ‘page’ two buttons, one marked ‘Next’ the other ‘Back’. In making comparisons with the book paradigm, what is often overlooked is the fact that the interacting subject is in the same kind of physical proximity to an IMM work as the reader of a book. Connections abound! 11 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateus. The medium of multime- dia itself, as well as contemporary commercial software design interfaces, has a certain rhizomatic pre-disposition in this respect and is an aspect either explored or exploited by other artists. 12 Jean-Louis Boissier, Two Ways of Making a Book, working notes for Flora Pentrinsularis; issue 1 book and CD-ROM in the artintact series; ZKM 1994.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 34 Part Four Four Reviews CD-ROM and the WWW
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 35 Four Reviews: CD-ROM and the WWW
Interface to Paradise? The cultural shift that comes about with the advent of a new medium marks a move- ment away from the ‘private universe of mind to the public world of the cathode ray tube’, as Derrick de Kerkhove has suggested.1 CD-ROM anticipates the computer net- works that in their initial stages propose a collective intelligence of hyperlinked hu- man activity. It is where modes of ‘listening’ are being re-defined and where the oral tradition is being redeveloped.
The contemporary arcades accessed through our computers, both on and off-line, defining the potential of the Interface in so many ways, were anticipated by Walter Benjamin at the last fin de siecle :
What all other cities seem to permit only reluctantly to the dregs of society - strolling, idling, flanerie - Paris streets actually invite everyone to do. Thus, the city has been the paradise of all those who need to chase after no livelihood, pursue no career, reach no goal - the paradise then of Bohemians, and not only artists and writers but of all those who have gathered about them because they could not be integrated - either politically, being homeless and stateless, or socially.’ (Benjamin 1970)
If Paris was Paradise, is the modern paradise the Web? Engaging the audience in a productive relationship is the Interface we are currently seeking to imagine and create. Though somewhat eclipsed by the current fashion for things on the Web, the CD-ROM combines the potential to create complex model worlds with material immutability — its major advantage. At this transitional stage of movement towards multimedia com- puter networks, the CD-ROM also enables the most sophisticated development of the interface, and, besides affirming aspects of an art-historical tradition, reveals opportu- nities for extensive research by artists to create interfaces of the future.
The following four published reviews describe some possibilities. • Family Files (1997), an interactive multimedia CD-ROM by Mari Soppela, was included in a exhibition of artists’ CD-ROM curated by Mike Leggett for the Microwave Festival, Videotage, Hong Kong, in December 1997, and subsequently released with Mediamatic magazine, June 1998. The review was commissioned and first published in edited form in World Art No. 18. • Planet of Noise (1997), an interactive multimedia CD-ROM by Brad Miller and McKensie Wark, is distributed by the artists, and the Australian Film Commission. The review was published in Photofile No.52 (1997), with the title, Planet of Noise. • The Story of Waxweb (1989-96) by David Blair, was included in Burning the Interface
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 36 FAMILY FILES by Mari Soppela 14
Home movies could be described as ‘family files’. In the same way as snapshots are compiled into picture albums, these images provide the visible evidence of human relationships - Faces in Places. Visible evidence as distinct from documentary evidence, which passes through an editorial process and is hence shaped according to an aes- thetic and tradition which aims to address a viewer, or as Ross Gibson has observed: “...listeners and readers exist because they want to encounter propositions delivered persuasively.” Persuasion is not the objective here but a series of pathways through an archive of home movies and the creation of a dynamic (poetic) space.
Mari Soppela in the interactive CD-ROM Family Files takes fragments of home movies, converts them on the computer to Quicktime movie loops and creates a matrix of nine frames on the screen. The matrix comes to life as the Mouse cursor rolls over one frame and rolls onto the neighbouring frame, freezing the one it leaves and animating the one at which it arrives. The process of working with these images enables the viewer to juxtaposition moments from the personal diary by starting and stopping the frag- ments at different points in their cycle - usually this involves working with two or three different loops to arrive at a reconfigured matrix reminiscent of the snaps in a photo album.
These images are the metaphor for memory itself - fragments of time, (the infamous ‘frozen moment’, even), suspended within the frame of recollection, reanimating and resensitising sounds and smells, reilluminating surfaces and patina, the textures of the personal past. The shaky, blurry and often scratched images on film, like those on paper, become the space and time of separation between the shared experiences repre- sented and the context into which they are received. For those who shared the making of the images, revelations and forgotten links, the pleasurable memory and the dis- comfort. For those outside the moments recorded, lacking the narrative that created them, the encounter can leave the document as dry and dusty as parchment, without meaning, without empathy.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 37 Interactive multimedia makes it possible for the observer to enter these spaces of time, place and memory, (or for the subject to re-enter them), and manipulate, con- template and make tractable, (on the screen and in the mind), the images and mo- ments represented. The interacting subject is made part of the process of meaning- making by ‘agreement’ with the artist. The understanding is that whilst the mechanics of discrete units are subject to manipulation, the accumulative effect of this is amelio- rated. The interacting subject arrives at a position through active engagement with the material construction rather than a passive observation of the overall effect. The Australian artist Linda Dement has observed in her own work the importance of the physical act of using a Mouse to move over an image. This is the tactile gesture which connects the interacting subject to the virtual objects which are experienced through the computer.
The starting screen in Family Files duplicates many times at many sizes the image of a clock face recorded on a trip to Hannover in 1994. A choice is made from the fifteen narrative diaries: 1996 Ruopsa; 1994 Helsinki; 1995 Am- sterdam, etc though the actual destina- tions are not known as each path is entered. Amsterdam is the city where Family Files was made - the artist’s studio; her kitchen, her living room, her garden, her children. The cafes, the street, the 15 grachts, the parks and those oh so Dutch pure light interiors..... (tot ziens!)
Mari Annukka Soppola was born and educated in Finland. She moved in the early ‘90s from a background in design and video to work with interactive media in Britain and Holland. It was her work as interaction designer and programmer with the Mediamatic group and in particular on the seminal Doors of Perception I conference documentation CD-ROM in 1995, (which won her a prize at the Digital Media & Interactive Media Festival, Los Angeles, and First prize in New Voices, New Visions run by the Voyager Company), that confirmed she had identified interactive multimedia as her preferred artform.
“Together with Tim Schofield, I program recursive code as a tool to process my memories. I have chosen a set of loops to represent a chapter in my life, like a wedding, and de- signed an interface - the system chooses four loops randomly each time and processes them the same way through the interaction.... It is not important what the image is but what happens to that image - exactly the same thing happens deep down in the code as does on the screen.”
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 38 Like several other artists working in this area, such as the British ‘virtual sculptor’ William Latham, Soppola is exploiting the programming possibilities of ‘recursive code’ which, like the material of the acetate film loop, repeats itself with subtle variations.
“As the image becomes recursive, the program simultaneously writes recursive lists to determine what loop plays, at what size, in what x/y positions, according to the Mouse position. With the serendipity that is introduced to the system, the fragments of the wedding keep floating in a poetic space, keeping their associative values unfixed explic- itly. In this way, my memories of the wedding keep changing. Different sets of the loops introduce surprising elements, like similar colours, with whom I can keep playing and daydreaming. In this level, it is that particular fragment and image, that particular moment in time that I perceive most strongly.”
At the beginning of each passage through moments from this life, a music track be- gins. It continues without pause throughout each engagement with the visual mate- rial. Her partner, Leon Anemaet, who prepares the soundtracks, likewise develops associations through music with distance and memory. The chorus from Sibelius’s Finlandia (re-worked, re-presented), waltzes through a trip to Helsinki; and impercep- tibly begins again if the time taken interacting with the matrix of images demands more time than the length of a 5-10 minute music track - forests, lakes, sunlight, boats and gorgeous, gorgeous, laughing friends and family.
The interaction is minimal. This is an immersion into a database through which one moves as through a forest or a crowd of people, moving this way and that way, never following the same path, rarely pausing for the same amount of time. Duration is the substance and the subject of a meditation here - and identification with moments common to all. Though the setting is northern Europe, the scenes of town and country are a symbolic topography into which the process of interaction inserts the subject. There follows a complex but conscious process whereby personal identification with the visual and sound elements work in parallel with interpretation - “..this is me, that is them...”.
Each transition from one matrix to the next is momentary, by way of a full screen enlargement from one of the frames in the matrix. The image is broken down (rasterised) into components of pixels grouped into squares, enlarged from the smaller (home movie) images. Like the frozen frames ‘created’ during the inter- active process, the image that is briefly on the screen is tenuous, fragile, break- ing into bit-mapped components of colour and line. They mirror the matrix of memory that seeks to fix order and sequence but which, when trying to comprehend with mental powers, or even control with a Mouse, constantly slip and slide away.2 16 Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 39 PLANET OF NOISE by Brad Miller and Mackenzie Wark
Encountering (what turns out to be) the central space of Planet of Noise (1997) is like entering the psychic space of an urban existence, with the flak and shash that is the backdrop to our continuum, there in the space contained by eyes and ears, screen and speakers. This is no virtual space. It is the flat space that jangles us by day and night, which rocks our senses with the artifice of colour and layout, which entreats any suspension or suspicion with the sweet reason of word 17 play and tinker bells. It is the centre, off-set, re-centred, re-framed - so that reason cannot function, so that the tension between gibberish and illumination can be asserted. This is unsettling, this is unclear, this bugs the question - “..is that all there is?”
The little orb revolves and circulates. No sapphire planet floating shipshape in its solar orbit this one. Each time it is seen, it wears a different coat of texture-mapped ex- otica. The interactor’s mouse chases it away! It will return, bouncing from the off- screen wall, the ball with a dog, and imitate the actions of the bouncing ball, leading the eye along the words - and then down the words, and then across the words, and then ... away, somewhere.
“Sunless: Planet of Noise. Planet orbiting no sun. Spinning itself out of itself.”
This little orb is actually the gateway forward through the exhibition, enabling one ‘frame’ and its associated sounds, to be replaced by the next. But, without resisting the anthropomorphic metaphor, first you have to catch it as it darts around, learn its habits, anticipate its re-entry, ambush its intention. The caught jester. Clicking it moves you on - at a brisk pace past each ‘frame’, or in more engaged manner, with each one.
At each interface the mouse rollovers (not rolls over) the on-screen text and triggers a female voice. She recites part or all of the phrase or saying. This is definitely not the well known phrase or saying encountered in the reference library (or even Channel Nine’s Catch Phrase).
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 40 Brad Miller and Mackenzie Wark have collaborated to produce dimensional aphorisms:
“High Fidelity: the complete relationship - to love and to lie; to be loved and deceived”.
At the appropriate rollover the voice reiterates: “to love and to lie; to be” as a coda of the original - until the mouse rolls off, returning some attention to the richly crafted backdrop.
This is a visual backdrop with full stereophonic accompaniment, employing the full gamut of sampled and electro-synthesised loops, prepared with contributions from Jason Gee, Derek Kreckler and Brendan Palmer. The visual backdrop over which each aphorism hovers is the digital equivalent of a medieval tapestry. These are mostly flat surfaces which have been texture value-added in Photoshop, (with some algorithmic conclusions to Mandelbrot’s work on Fractals). There are also surfaces directly re- purposed from Miller’s earlier seminal work, Digital Rhizome (1994) including the ‘infini-d worm hole’ three-dimensional forms that featured so centrally in that hypercarded piece. In an encounter with Digital Rhizome, an early exploration of hypermedia (now called multimedia), it is soon realised that whilst the sequence is the unique result of how each interaction proceeds, the process of interacting is learnt to influence progress but not ‘control’ it. This is the case too with Planet of Noise. How- ever, the ‘mazing’ process of clicking outwards in a conceptual circle, attempting to plot ‘landmark’ images along the way in order to map the topography of the piece, is not possible. Neither the other diffuser of subversive strategies - interpretation. There is however, a list on the jewel-case cover of Mackenzie Wark’s aphorism texts, enabling a sense of proportion if not place, to be maintained.
Aphorisms are pithy sentences (wittily) expressing a precept or principle. Besides being economical with language they impose that moment of reflection which allows the individual readers personality to explore and extract a full meaning, if not several. Such interaction is at the core of Planet of Noise and is both the form and content of the work.3
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Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 41 Dimensions of extra-textuality are added to the aphorisms. Besides recitation, the mouse rollover might trigger a slogan (“..discovered!”), or a sound extract, events which sidle into the general ambience of the sound loop that runs behind the dis- played words. The events are of course the ‘bites’ which the doorstop journalist has made so famous - those ten-second sentences which summarise the situation, the position, the event; a speech, a disaster, a success, a discovery. Moments elevated by attention, by a framing, editing, honing process which digests the occurrence into its accepted category, ready for uncritical consumption. Digital mediums are perfect for doing this since each pixel, each fraction of a waveform is replaceable, removable - revisable. To remove the photo-image from having a privileged relationship with truth is the implication here, by placing ‘photograph as evidence’ into the doomed archives of history and confirming the documentary and the photo-journals as works of creative endeavour.4
Planet of Noise word fields are separated from the backdrop by an aura, (actually called feathering in the Photoshop menu), bathing the typography in a supporting cushion of ethereality. Whilst words, backdrop, recitation, music, effects, your friendly playful bouncing ball AND the subtly changing indicators of the cursor icon itself float before your very eyes in off-centred profusion, your brain begins to engage with dimensions of meaning which extrude somehow behind the image at which you gaze.
Meaning is returned to the subject. There is no link here, other than the metaphysical. No coded text which ejects the reader to another text on some other site on the other side of the world or another sector of the CD-ROM. Immersion here is sequential, following the predetermined path around the virtual gallery’s hidden walls, formed as they are, invisibly, into ten rooms (or Zones) - Eden Free Trade Zone; Republic of Sadness; The Military Entertainment Complex - which group each aphorism into an association with the reality of contemporary real-politik. And the way out of each room? Back to where you started. Is the metaphor complete? Well no, remember we’re dealing with a figure of speech here which places it’s meaning clearly at your door. Stop? Well, not yet.... 5
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 42 WAXWEB by David Blair
When exhibiting photographs the context for presentation is often out of the hands of the photographer. At worst, they are slung around the walls of a room by a gallery manager; or scattered across some pages by a picture editor; zoomed and panned by a caption camera; or emblazoned from the screen or hoarding. Even when Chris Marker frames and edits La Jetee6, the feature-length film com- posed entirely of still black and white photographs, are the conditions for 19 projection as the film-maker would have wished?
The computer screen is a space that is developing as a viable option for the exhibition of the photographic image, particularly as part of the on-going development of the multimedia computer. This offers the option of interaction with images and the inte- gration of typography, graphics, small-screen movies, sound, text and ‘other means of reproduction yet to be invented’ . The circus that is multimedia is currently suffering its baby blues. The hype has grounded. The production techniques and budgets neces- sary are too close to a small feature film. However, there is plenty yet to be done in these new areas of art-making and distribution, primarily with CD-ROM and the World Wide Web.
Initially, assuming the space in which the screen is sited is neutral, what are the variables which will affect reading the picture on a computer screen? Picture fidelity is affected by two factors: the fixed resolution of the standard monitor - 72 pixels/ dots per inch/25mm; and the number of colours available for ‘mixing’ - from 4 to millions depending on the monitor setting selected on the computer. This factor is affected by the processing and memory resources of the computer but broadly speak- ing, the more colours, the slower is the picture drawn.
Image storage is the other main variable. Even with an image which is full-screen, (640 dots/pixels by 480) and 256 colours, the digital file-size of the image would require 300 kilobytes of disc space to be stored, ready to be processed to the screen. Seven images to one floppy disc is a limited number for distributing. CD-ROM in its Kodak form (Photo-CD) was introduced as the blandest mode of the presentation of images though very convenient and with a lot of storage space and used mainly for the conveyance of images with resolution suitable for magazine reproduction.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 43 Artists were among the first to pick-up the broader potential of the CD-ROM medium as it emerged two or three years ago from the industrial stage to the desktop stage. Practitioners already using the early versions of Director, Photoshop and Illustrator could now see a way to getting their work off the fragile hard disc locked inside the computer and into a distributable form as a series of pits burned onto the more dura- ble material of a CD-ROM, a medium also useful for the efficient storage of images collected as part of the production process.
As a means of conjoining a great multiplicity of material and sending it across the world and as evidenced by recent research, CD-ROM has come into its own. However, the unusual number of skills that have to be acquired for artisanal production by the individual together with the excruciating nature of some of the software which, in the electronic age, has re-introduced the hazards of lace-making to interface design, make for an extended production period and thus the danger of ossification of ideas and concepts contained in the work - not much room for improvisation and spontaneous reaction.
The World Wide Web, as the test-bed for the heralded information superhighway offers some relief here, and requires a little explanation. The Web is the part of the Internet which is fully capable of graphically displaying photographs, typography, text, small-screen movies, sound, illustrations and other framed graphics. The setting-up of each screen (page) is undertaken using Hypertext Markup Language - HTML - whereby simple codes are entered against parts of the page which need to have a par- ticular appearance, or need to be linked directly to a contiguous part of the 20 narrative. And this is the really innova- tive difference that distinguishes the web medium from all others, such as desktop publishing which is what it resembles, in that an electronic link can be established to another piece of text or image on the hard disc of the accessing machine, or it could be called from another hard disc down the room, or from another computer on the other side of the world. The software required to both ‘view’ and ‘make’ the hyperlinked pages is currently freely available. All that is needed to view is the connection to the Internet - this will vary according to the facilities offered by each service provider. To park artwork on a hard disc which is accessible 24-hours a day - a necessity if you want international representation - is a matter of renting space from a service pro- vider; or from within an institution, borrowing the space.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 44 This hyperlinking aspect theoretically will enable one copy only of each document, (picture, text, sound or movie), to be kept on one hard disc in one part of the world and for all uses of that data to be routed via networks from ‘viewing’ computers, wher- ever they may be. Currently, obtaining an image from the other side of the world can be an arduous process but experience over the next few years on the test-bed will evolve methods of doing this in a more practical way. But essentially, as a medium of distribution and exhibition, artists will be the first to evolve new means of extending its potential, as they have been in the development of the computer itself over the past fifty years.
It won’t be long before the internet service providers are ready to connect homes in quantity and enable usage of this truly remarkable phenomena which, in effect, gives anyone at a computer access to literally millions of other hard discs and the different kinds of information on them. But it will be many more years before the carrying capacity of the ‘wires’ can deliver, on demand, the kind of multimedia production currently available on CD-ROM. There is much to be learnt therefore, in this interim period, through continuing distribution on CD-ROM, and the hybrid forms. These forms allow the spontaneity of the Web to exist alongside the more grounded and substantial nature of what can be compiled onto a CD-ROM.
The process of the convergence of previously distinct mediums and the exploration of emergent computer-based forms has been tracked by several art- ists, but currently the New York based artist David Blair and a continuing project, “WAX or the discovery of televi- sion among the bees” is an good exam- ple of where imagination, besides resid- ing in a work, responds to changing conditions for its exhibition. 21 In an embodiment as ‘electronic cinema’, WAX was presented in Sydney in 1992 as part of the Third International Symposium of Electronic Art (TISEA) and tipped by John Conomos as “becoming one of the cult videos of the ’90s”7. Included in the TISEA program by virtue of some computer generated footage cut-in with the live action, perhaps the comment should have referred to ‘the cult project’, since by that time and six years work complete, the same material has since developed into new contexts.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 45 The process of shifting from the chrysalis stage of the linear and analogue through pupation to the digital and polylinear of WAXWEB took two years resulted in Waxweb being launched to the world over the Internet in July 1994. The project combined with a parallel project in Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), where users can collectively write, annotate, and explore hypermedia documents across the Internet.8 Specially written software, Storyscape “allows people in difference places to add hypertext nodes and links to a single document. I asked 25 writers scattered in US, Japan, Germany, Finland, and Australia..... I expected that the new contributors would act almost as an analogue poetry machine, creating unexpected narrative connections and material through their processes of reading/writing. If necessary, editors could go through the material, not deleting submissions, but adding indexes and other metalinking schema in order to give coherent shape to the material.”9
The linear narrative of the video, (which of course includes any deconstructed narrative content), was transformed before our very eyes into a database of photo-images and written text, permutated by the interaction of the ‘viewer’ (responding computer operator?) into a multi-interpretable, multi-dimensional narrative referred to by Blair as “image-processed narrative”.
In this Waxweb form of the project all the picture and text material in digital form was conveyed to the viewer’s com- puter over lines from the host computer which auspices Blair, in the University of Virginia. Depending on the capacity and busyness of the connection between the host and client computers so the time taken to ‘draw’ a screen complete with images can vary from a few seconds to a few minutes, which, when in pursuit of a narrative, can be too long. 21
Thus the next pupation to hybrid form - the substantive part of the image and text database, with the video component relocated into fifty short segments of about a minute each, together with the HTML reader software, compiled by Blair onto a re- cently released CD-ROM.
This embodiment of the project’s material, still at an initial stage in its evolution, makes no attempt to harness the sleight of hand of the graphic designer. The on- screen appearance is reminiscent of commercial CD-ROM titles - that of the pages from a book, with titlepage, contents page, apologias, contextual writings of several kinds, and various forewords:
“The main body of the hypertext/picture document amounts to 3100 pages of text, and 1630 colour stills, each in 3 sizes (about 5000)..(and)... the entire Quicktime version of the movie...” 10
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 46 Interaction with the ‘story’ can occur from the front on three levels - overview, me- dium detail and shot by shot. The viewer can also enter from the Index either to the beginning of one of the Three Acts, (entitled, Alamogordo; the Desert; the Cave and beyond), or by picking through the fragments of words and images accumulated by the project over the eight years.
The interaction has begun - decisions have to be made. To be told a story, or to be- come an archaeologist?
“It’s a strange story”, (says the artist in one of the written documents included with the work - “One of the boldest examples of cinema as dream” says the Boston Globe). “But it is a story, and we’ve made a lot of effort to translate the time-based version into this stop and go medium. You don’t get the clock-based flow, but you get an exponentially larger amount of association and detail that are important parts of this narrative style which you can’t get enough of with time-based media just yet, not until controllable multiple streams become available. Metaphorically, I like to think that the real narrative to all this exists somewhere in the 4th dimension, from where it casts a variety of shadows of itself in various media - onto film, on Web, onto CD-ROM, onto videotape, etc....” 11
The Prologue ‘page’ introduces the hero and narrator. Small photo-images pepper the lines of text. Since the CD-ROM is connected directly to the viewing computer’s proces- sor, images are drawn rapidly to the screen - this provides an aesthetic element not present in the Web version whereby, at times, large number of small photo-images that need to be drawn, up to thirty or forty for one page, do so as a rhythmic spawning, pulsing one to the next, as the computer methodically processes each image into view. The highlighted text and the photo-images are all hyperlinked to other parts of the narrative matrix enabling you to construct your version of the narrative sequence by simply clicking the aspect of your choice. The actual number of permutations of this narrative maze can be calculated against the various levels at which options are pre- sented to the viewer in making selections hyperlinked to corresponding levels - many millions.
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Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 47 The narrative style in the Overview level is descriptive and commences:
“Hive-Maker and Ghosts Through the lens of a projector, we enter a film. The year is 1914, and James Hive-Maker , a Spiritualist Cinematographer, has travelled to the Antarctic in order to gather images of the dead. The next year, he travels to the Battle of Ypres, where he finds them floating above clouds of poison gas. Hive-Maker search is motivated by a belief that the Dead live near to us, illuminated by a moral decay similar to the glow of a radium watch. This light, and their Land, can be made photo- graphically visible. By extension, Hive-Maker hypothesises that these living lights can visit our world (and that in reverse, we can visit their world). “
By clicking an image we descend a level and have the same picture redrawn as a larger image. It is now part of a sequence of other images, each interspersed with written dialogue - in English and French.12 (French presumably became folded into the wax during an earlier collaborative stage with a French-speaker.) The randomly generated narrative sequence is no stranger to writers as a means for exciting the imagination and commencing a technique of writing based on the act of editing - in recent times the French surrealists of the ’30s and the junk writing of William Burroughs. In the Waxweb, in common with much of the emerging interactive art, there is no clue as to where you may be led by taking a highlighted option. Here, an ‘indomitable’ style reminiscent of boys adventure writing sets the tone for motivat- ing the hyperlinked explorer to proceed. Hints at all manner of animal, vegetable and mineral occurrence abound, tainted with a whimsical uneasy sense of paranoia and general foreboding. Photographs from many sources plop into view generally of a minimalist nature and so confounding interpretation of a too literal kind. This is left to the fantasies of the writing in combination with the imagination of the reader, and so is reminiscent of other text-photo-image productions by various photographers, publications13 and film/video-makers of the ’60s and ’70s - the ‘golden age’ of contem- porary experiment? Individual photo-images sometimes leap out, usually the digitally spliced kind - juxtaposition and the unexpected within the unifying frame continue to grab the hunter’s eye. As one slips from one level to the next within the snakes-and- ladders narrative space, the abstracted characters encountered remain as distanced as Brecht demanded but without the moral drive or direction within or without the proc- ess what is left is, as a ‘statement’, contemporary, cool and insipid.
What is confirmed is the other process, the existential, ‘WAX, the discovery of mean- ing-making amongst multimedia users’! Memory, the crux of narrative, (and yes, com- puters too), is tested and teased like Delphine Seyrig’s14 and that of you the interact- ing computer user. As the fascination wanes for the cohorts of characters, the Hero and the Hive-maker, the active subjective memory is tested and tried as we struggle to ‘fix’ a photo-image, recall it, replace it, retrace it, and then to find it within the matri- ces, using the narrative incidents as clues to navigation from one gallery level to the next. Re-align it, retrieve it, first to the screen and so to active memory - is this the one? It doesn’t quite match. Next frame? Could it be a sequence of film frames with the fractional difference between each one? Is this where meaning is reduced to a tonal span?
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 48 Currently the enterprise has gestated another step from involving invited collaborators to an open invitation. “Waxweb 2.0 is an html-speaking multimedia MOO, and as such is a dynamic document. MOO’s are tools for computer supported collaborative work and play, etc., which allow real time intercommunication - they are text-based virtual realities. ... We have used the dynamic processes of the MOO to make it possible for visitors to add hypermedia to Waxweb. Using a forms-based interface, users have the ability to make immediately visible links from any word to any other word, add comments to any page, and also to create their own pages (or many pages!), thus adding to narrative of the main Waxweb.” 15
So, the writer/creator is elevated, and the critic is retrenched - if you don’t like it, change it! The viability of this precept I have been unable to test using the early version explored, but given the project’s track record, it will work in a way that will make visiting the Web site a kind of pilgrimage - an act of faith and an act of confir- mation of the scope of the concept, the extent of which (“..and that’s not all..”) is still being defined, with fully networked virtual reality interactivity of narrative and hyperlink within a 3D world, (using VRML or virtual reality modelling language,)
This further extension, to an endlessly evolving grand project, takes the photograph into a context for presentation which is clearly within the hands of the photographer, though only as an initial, certainly provisional act, within the context of a MOO. Maybe the notion of the MOO, which theoretically can link every collection of images on a computer to every other collection of images on any other computer, announces the end of the director, the curator, the end of the cultural Frame? Well, no. Because like every other institution, it is the users, in most cases, who determine, for the most part, for what the organism is to be used - if there are enough people who want to be directed, they’ll make their particular MOO.
The historical point we have reached is the equivalent to that reached by cinema having established the principle of the moving camera but prior to the dynamics intro- duced by editing - about the time Munsterberg wrote his study in 1916 of ‘the silent photoplay’16. As an organic entity, WAXWEB is an early model of future spaces. These will re-introduce an aural culture, richly inflected by the images and sounds of its users.17
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 49 BEYOND by Zoe Beloff
Beyond enters the fin de siecle - that of the 20th century for the production of this interac- tive CD-ROM and the 19th century for its point of reference, for its sources. Both periods are characterised by rapid technological change directly affecting social intercourse.
The notion of discourse - the development of ideas and themes occurring as a series of responses which can be asynchronous and cyclical rather than following a singular and linear progression - can be closely mimicked by the modes of navigation made possible by interactive multimedia. Beyond uses the tool as metaphor for the navigation of aspects of late- 19th century discourse. Centuries of inherited belief weakened by the then recent action of the Enlightenment were being challenged by new systems of knowledge. Technology and more importantly, the corporate power this gave its owners, was claimed by detractors at that time as in our own, to be at the expense of the imagination and liberty itself. Beloff examines some of the swirls and eddies created by this process.
The wreck of a rural hospital in a site sur- rounded by leafless trees is the launching point for excursions into readings, (the sources of which are diligently listed in a thesis-like bibliographic section). Cross-overs to the contemporary world are not easy to come by but are accessible through both the familiar 21 (Baudelaire) and the unfamiliar (the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet), and W. Benjamin, who’s writings in this exploration delineate the edge closest to our own time.
“And why Baudelaire? He was the first great writer of the modern city, the first modern- ist. It was he who first defined this idea of “mental geography” as a state of mind. The city shot through by allegory. He was the archetypal flâneur - while my work might be described as an exercise in digital flânerie!” 18
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 50 The assembled texts, as performances, are accompanied by photographs and film of various goings-on in the living-rooms of the “experimentalists” of the time - seances, parapsychology, the paranormal, (evidenced in one memorable moment with the title “rare example of a nude ghost photograph”), pornography, dress-ups, trips and expedi- tions.
“I have been interested for some time in early serial films particularly those of Louis Feuillade (Les Vampires) - I love the way he made up the episodes of his serial films as he went along.” 18 Whilst the work is imbued with ideas of the time, Beloff draws parallels between multimedia and the then developing technology and aesthetic of cinema: “No one makes serials any more so I decided to make a serial and put it on the Web. It wasn’t a literal narrative serial, it was just me, travelling in time and space, sending back reports each week, exploring the relationship between technology and imagination from around 1850 to 1940.” 18
Beyond commenced by using a tiny QuickCam camera feeding directly into the compu- ter to make QuickTime movies which though of postage stamp dimensions were hungry for space on the hard disc. “It became so enormous that I transformed it into a CD- ROM. Everything was done “live”, I projected the film, played the music and read the texts often all at the same time. I just spent the day starting from a rough idea, no notes or plans, setting things up in my house, trying things out till something somehow worked. I love to throw myself into something and surprise myself. It was more like “casting a spell” than making a movie.” 19
The artist records her interventions into the showing of the found footage by, for instance, suspending words on transparent material in front of the image. At other times Beloff appears whilst footage projects behind her as the narration proceeds. Objects are introduced to accompany the reciting of the words, completing the rich visual collage, accompanied by a sound mix of the recited quotes, (in a funny squashed declamatory voice), which drop names from the period like so many leaves in the virtual scene outside. Music of the period, both symphonic and ensemble, complete the effect of synthesising decaying, mouldering and essentially private goings-on (at the bottom of the garden) in this deserted country hospital, which “resonate more with the imagination through atmospherics and a kind of moodiness”, in the words of Judy Annear.20
“If Baudelaire and Benjamin might define the circumference of the circle, then the centre I think of in the person of Raymond Roussel and his relationship with his doctor, Pierre Janet. It is Roussel’s madness in the form of his novel Locus Solus that radiates outwards..... Written in 1914, Locus Solus simply recounts a tour of the estate of a famous Inventor Martial Canterel (who was modelled on Edison). One by one, bizarre mechanical inventions are described. Roussel’s explanatory mania always goes beyond the fantastically detailed mechanical descriptions of moving parts, cogs and wheels.” 21
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 51 Much admired by the French surrealists, Beloff recounts that Roussel’s novel goes on to describe the Ice House. “Here we see a series of dioramas which are open to public viewing behind glass. Within each little set an actor performs the same melodramatic set piece over and over again with uncanny exactitude. These scenes become truly strange when we discover that all the so called “actors” are dead...... Up until the turn of the century, the Paris Morgue was an extremely popular place of public entertainment. ... Here spectators lined up around the block to see dead people, criminals, unclaimed dead children, ... positioned behind glass, suitably chilled in rather pathetic tableau.” 21
The technologies of the time are both reported upon, fantasised about and simultane- ously become a mirror for the image-based technologies of that time, the Nickelodeon and the picture house.
QuickTime VR (Virtual Reality) is the tool which presents us with 360 degree navigable images of the grounds to the desolate hospital and its smashed interiors. ‘Virtual graffiti’ are superimposed within these, the ‘hot spots’ for hyperlinking to the formally prepared video pieces. Prepared as discrete entities these are observed, from beginning to end on a tiny central screen, the interaction being confined to selecting a pathway from one ‘screening’ to the next. It is a productive pathway, quickly producing some- times surprising, sometimes cyclical movement onwards. In spite of this process oper- ating in the non-linear space of multimedia it has a clarity and luminance that in- trigues and amuses.
“It is a solitary experience, both for me making the work and also viewing the work. This I think allows fantasy to flourish. The computer is very much a space of fantasy on many different levels.” 21
What is named ‘Screen Graffiti’ is the film material from the first 30 years of this century that Beloff has gleaned, Benjamin-like, from the flea markets - the clawed home movies, the flickering newsreels and the expired porn. The Hindenberg airship features in the opening ‘title sequence’ floating over New York City, the artist’s home. This image sets the pattern - writers from the latter part of the 19th Century, are juxterpositioned with incidents that occurred in the first part of the 20th Century, orchestrated by the multimedia technology available at the end of the 20th Century.
To complete the encounter, (as we approach the end of this century), in the closing title shot the film is reversed and the Hindenberg rises from the ground again, extin- guishing its flames and floating off to hover again, icon like, on the screen of the computer. 22
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 52 Notes for Part Four
1 The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality Derrick de Kerckhove, reviewed in RealTime/11 (Leggett 1996) 2 Family Files was included in a exhibition of artists’ CD-ROM, curated by Mike Leggett for the Microwave Festival, Videotage, Hong Kong, December 1997, and subsequently released with Mediamatic magazine, June 1998. This review was commissioned and first published in edited form in World Art No. 18. 3 Derrick de Kirckhove, associate of McLuhan and now director of the Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, in his book, The Skin of Culture, employs aphorisms to different ends. In the book, one of De Kirckhove’s concerns to direct us away from the literate ear and toward the associative of the oral ear. Indeed he uses an aphorism in doing so: “Our neglect of the ear may be one of the prices we have paid for literacy”. Georg Lichtenberg developed the art of the aphorism in the 18th Century and devised one which shrilly warns: “There are many people who won’t listen until their ears are cut off.” 4 The contemporary clothing advertisement featuring the photo- manipulated Yalta conference news photograph, achieves what Stalin attempted to do unsuccessfully when he ordered Trotsky touched out of all known group photographs. Of course the ad also demonstrates that exaggerated lies will succeed where slightly altered truth by conceal- ment will fail. 5 Planet of Noise CD-ROM distributed by the artists and the Austral- ian Film Commission. Review published in 1997, ‘Planet of Noise’ CD- ROM review, Photofile No.52. 6 La Jetee (France 1963) a narrative that explores through several hundred photo-images and a narrator soundtrack, the experiences of a group of people who are the surviors following a nuclear war. 7 Sydney Morning Herald 14.11.92 8 A detailed account of how the Storyspace software enables this has been published in Media International Australia by Adrian Miles (Miles 1996) and is similar to the Storyscape software that Blair uses. 9 “The Story of Waxweb” David Blair. Document on Waxweb 2.0 Alpha 3 29.3.95, CD-ROM 10 Introduction “Welcome to Waxweb 2.0 Alpha 3 29.3.95” David Blair 11 op.cit 12 The entire audio of the film version of WAX was available in its first Web version in English, French, German, and Japanese.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 53 13 In the American context the work of Michael Lesy in particular with Wisconsin Deathtrip and Real Life (Lesy 1973, also 76 and 80). 14 In L’Anné derniére á Marienbad the 1961 French film by Alain Resnais winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes. 15 The Story of Waxweb op cit 16 The Photoplay: a psychological study, (Munsterberg 1916) 17 First published as Waxweb - photo-images Buzzing on the Wires’, Photofile No.45, ACP, Sydney. Some small corrections have been made to the published version but the speculations, in spite of the temptations of hindsight, have been left in their original state. 18 Zoe Beloff in the catalogue of the 15th World Wide Video Festival held in Amsterdam at the Stedelijk Museum in September 1997 19 Baltz, Lewis 1998, Biennale de L’Image at the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, May /July 1998 20 Catalogue of the 15th World Wide Video Festival op.cit 21 Whitney Biennale review in Photofile No 51; ACP Sydney. 22 Distributed by the artist through her website. A shortened and edited version of this review appeared in World Art No.18 1998.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 54 Part Five Electronic Space & Public Space Museums, Galleries and Digital Media
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 55 Electronic Space and Public Space Museums, Galleries and Digital Media
New Spaces The multiplicity of sources available over the internet make the domestic space the newest space capable of exhibiting electronic arts!
This could as easily be the kitchen or the lounge room as it could be the studio. The opportunities for receiving original art at home is limited by material resources - to buy a painting or sculpture is an occasional possibility. Art in editions - prints, books, recordings, videos - commodify this possibility still further. Television and radio though potentially fertile in the field of performance, has remained firmly under the thumb of politicians, accountants and journalists, suffering from the legacy of both Orson Welles and his radio production of War of the Worlds, and Dr Goebells and the production of war utilising the medium of radio. Only occasionally is a full-blooded art experience delivered to the home with the technology of mass dissemination - the late Derek Jarman’s Blue (1992) was a memorable example, experienced via television.1
Electronic arts are beginning to appear in CD-ROM form or on the Web and make inter- action and immersion with another creative person’s output potentially a domestic activity - the privacy and repose that usually goes with this space is conducive to creative engagement. Indeed we can anticipate the development of work which re- sponds to this state - contemplative, unhurried, exotic......
In Sydney during February 1995, a popular ‘serious’ bookshop together with a compu- ter supply company, sponsored an artists’ CD-ROM corner, where customers could examine and without obligation, purchase work produced by several Australian artists and a few other titles.
In Melbourne during 1994 a small group of people with arts administration background rented a small shop space in a prestigious shopping development on the banks of the Yarra river in the centre of the city. Using their credit cards and a free rental period they exhibited computer generated work in all its manifestations, sold computer games and nick-knacks, and acted as consultants to match artists with industry on a fee-for- service basis.
In a seaside suburb of Melbourne, in the street associated with cafes and cakes, one of the coffee shops, in 1994, charged for access to the internet by the minute adding the cost to the tab. By 1999, every street in the country had a cafe selling coffee and access. If nothing else, it has revolutionised the backpacker experience, enabling travellers to rendezvous effortlessly in ways that would have taken previous genera- tions months and a lot of chance using messages, the phone and snailmail.
The public network of galleries, both those with collections and those without, strug- gle to understand the issues, and in the case of the smaller more flexible spaces, mount the campaigns necessary to convince the funding bodies that investment is needed in systems and network connections.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 56 Old Spaces The work of contemporary artists working with ‘new media’, or more accurately, devel- oping media technologies, is having a considerable impact upon established galleries and museums, the traditional sites for encountering visual art and artists. Photography and video, and more recently, computer mediated work and telematic networks, extend demands on the resources required by these institutions to act as both an archive and a forum, as well as challenge traditional notions of culture and heritage.
As an archive, the international museums’ functions of collecting, cataloguing and conserving media art are being responded to, with few exceptions, in ways which are wholly lacking in foresight, enthusiasm and imagination.2 As a public forum, again with few exceptions, museums and galleries are continuing to regard the audience as a localised, homogenous group of cultural consumers and seem unable to provide a space in which interactions of all kinds can occur between the media artist, the artist’s work, the interlocutor of the nexus of the interaction, (the curator, the critic, the essayist, etc), and the individual visitor. Interaction, the cruxes of so much 20th Century art, other than through the somewhat ecclesiastical approach of the lecture and the guest spot, is manifest in these spaces only through the happenstance of certain media art ‘pieces’.3
Points of convergence as well as dissonance in the visual arts will be examined within the following taxonomies. The points at which media art and media artists enter the public sphere, knowledge delivery, as distinct from knowledge development, and the emergence of work into exhibition spaces closely associated with the production studio and other places and points where visibilities might be ‘hidden in plain sight’. 4
Exhibiting, as administered by the larger institutions, curatorial practice and the options available for the presentation of work is also examined in addition to reflec- tions upon the experience of interface and immersion within interactive multimedia that again asks the question - why should I want to interact? - this time viewed from the curator’s position.
“Please Touch the Exhibits” - Interactions Interaction, as opposed to reflection, is at odds with the ‘real’ world, or what could be called most certainly, the non-virtual world. Within most public spaces, including between the walls of most galleries and museums, the passive regard or reflection upon an artwork is accepted as a sign of respect for the integrity of its maker and the aura of the object itself. The pursuit through more active means of the personal pre- rogative within a work is somehow regarded as an aggressive form of self-seeking by the viewer, questioning traditions of authorship and challenging the inviolability of inherited artefacts.
While society accepts experience as it is mediated by corporations, governments and professionals that propagate viewpoints which entertain, ‘provide answers’ to the existential continuum, or simply provides distraction from all of that, the visibility, amplification and accessibility of the mediating process is absent. There is little space created for even a reflexive response, let alone the possibility for interaction.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 57 For many who encounter art casually, visitors to museums and galleries, reflection is often assumed to be the response of the art viewer, reposing before the ‘mirror of the soul’. Confronted with much of the art produced during this century however, the response required by the artist from the audience has more often been the reflexive - what the historian and commentator Simon Schama has observed as being:”...the increasingly precious and reflexive variations on the venerable modernist theme of the uncoupling of painterly process and its ostensible objects, the endless pirouettes around the holy of holies: representation theory”. (Schama 1996)
The reflexive of course does not necessarily lead to the theoretical domain, even at the risk of alarming Schama and other fogyist commentators, but acknowledges and en- courages, often prevoking discourse beyond that of the interpretive, the subjective and the wholly speculative.
The responses of the audience(s) to an encounter with any kind of cultural artefact is contentious and too highly complex to be dealt with here satisfactorily. It could be emphasised though that ‘the apparatus’ that delivers the experience of the artefact is of course the artist’s concern, even though the exact process by which this occurs may be ineffable to some. However, and with a loop back to a earlier sections (Jurassic Multimedia and Recap pp9), the means of (re)presentation of Image ConText : One & Two (1979 & 1982) gave an Audience, (that is the audience as theorised by the pre- senter, as well as the audience present on each occasion), the possibility to influence through their very presence, the nature and the course of events. The reflexive opera- tions of response, spontaneity, participation and even chance, affect the reception as well as the direction taken during a playing or performance of the work.
In the context of electronic media it could be suggested that a succession of similar reflexes are what is now called interaction. Much recent multimedia work by artists explores this potential, essentially by enabling an audience of individuals to directly navigate through the various ‘screen spaces’ that make up the virtual whole. Such a demand, of the public in a museum, even the investing clientele visiting a gallery, demands an involvement, a priori, in the reflexive act of making the work, as well as the act of making meaning pursued to a level of contentment or pleasure for each individual.
Professor Roy Ascott once wrote that ours is “an art which is emergent from a multiplic- ity of interactions in electronic spaces.”
There is a certain irony in quoting Ascott, the champion of “telematic culture”, or art on the wire - Homo Telematicus and the “connectivist manifesto” in relation to the concrete spaces that are the public galleries and museums. A multiplicity of interac- tions in electronic space can of course be encountered in the three dimensional space of a public gallery as well as the private space of “computus domesticus”. Indeed the actual presence of people along with the virtual presence of those on-line could con- stitute a chance for divergent forms from within the emergence that Ascott proposes and which, since the time he made the statement, are emerging at an exponential rate and challenging the exhibiting institutions to reflect upon their role.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 58 Trevor Smith, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia has observed that there is a gap between art of the past, audience expectations and art- ists’ production and process: “Many galleries in Australia continue to treat photography, let alone video, or today’s version of new media, with a great deal of suspicion, in part because of this recognition gap”, and in part because media arts imply that the galler- ies and museums would need to change the paradigms and priorities within which they work.
“It has become increasingly obvious to me that especially when younger people are in the gallery, the video and photography for example, captures their imagination in a very different way to the traditional media. Now this does not mean that painting has ceased to be a significant arena for production, it is simply that as Arthur Danto has recently put it: “Painting is no longer the engine of art history” .5
Noel Frankham,6 the recent director of the Centre for Contemporary Craft in Sydney reported that he had spent one and a half hours with a touring social history exhibi- tion, Home of the Brave, a computer system operating audio zones within the gallery. “As I walked through the exhibition an ‘audio guide’ that only I could hear was acti- vated. The individual control that the headset provided, without buttons or knobs, en- couraged a level of empathy between me, the curators and the objects that I’d never experienced before, making the exhibition most moving, rewarding and memorable.” 7
Institutional forms need to be developed in order that the widest possible multiplicity of interactions can occur in electronic space in the most public way, so that others, particularly tax-payers and sponsors can gain access to, and information about art in gallery and museum spaces. By extending the institutions function to a dynamic (non- ecclesiastical) educational role, the tendency which divides the information rich from the experiential poor would be ameliorated and accelerate the movement away from an attitude revealed in this quote from a young fogey Sydney-based arts commentator who opinionated: “Peering at a monitor is an impoverished aesthetic experience.”8
Curations Curators are often described as gatekeepers, with the implication that they are respon- sible for allowing certain artists through the gate whilst excluding others. But this is only part of the selection process that occurs.
Preparing the exhibition, Burning the Interface
• There are the marks placed on a whole range of artworks. • There are marks on the different art worlds who will encounter the work. • There are also the marks placed on the various ways in which the work could be presented or installed and introduced to the different art worlds.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 59 These are worlds which are many, varied and encompass a range of social spaces that may seem at odds with the project that is contemporary art. As the responsibility for resourcing the making of art shakes and shifts between the beneficence of patrons, the mammon of the state, the paying audience and the stingy collector, more recent no- tions of sponsorship by commerce shuffles into line. The corporate sponsor, cutting costs to the bone to obtain maximum leverage in the stock market listings, is intro- duced by the government to its ‘social responsibilities’. The latest player in shaping what a nation’s culture and art worlds should contain, besides consumer goods and vaporous services, like the others, seeks some positive returns.
For the artist or curator seeking engagement outside the immediate coterie, the art worlds list is lengthening:
• the art world of the museum or ‘arts professionals’ of directors, registrars, curators, administrators, conservators and all those whose fascination, and often experience, is with the science of the three ‘c’s’: collect, catalogue, conserve. ‘Show and tell’ is an acquired predilection;
• the art world of the schools and tertiary courses, and the teachers who wish to present this world to their students, framed in an intelligent way, that challenges assumptions yet provides pathways and routes of access;
• the art world of the ever ‘nascent’ Multimedia Industry, which whilst stead- fastly resisting the ideas and issues that artists wish to raise, cannot resist the possibility that some upstart has actually pointed the way to the next “killer app”;9
• the world of art as understood by the computer hardware and audio-visual industries, which instead of displaying titillating body parts by way of demonstrating their equipment, from time to time seek an alternative from a contemporary artist;
• the world of art as imagined by the artist, who often regards the whole process of mounting an exhibition as ‘a piece of cake’, in which they are the chef and someone else is the restaurateur and somehow, for sure, people will want to flock to see the chef’s latest creation, though may hesitate to actually taste, let alone digest its delights;
• the art in the world as fantasised by the media and its commentators who, having abandoned their readers and viewers to the ads, feel the only way to regain their attention is to be as equally preposterous with claims and counter claims, opinions and insinuations;
• the heartfelt world of the politicians, arts on sleeve, eager to support or condemn, depending on which way the polls are blowing;
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 60 • the artful world of the pollies’ instrumentalities, the personal and policy advisers, the various government departments, each running with their own agendas, many eager to receive proposals to add to their statistical counts and performance indicators, which might, as a bonus to the proposer, be able to deliver part of the budget requested.
The accumulation of marks against these various art worlds - and there are more - created whole nebulae of negotiations for the Burning the Interface development team. The outcome of these multifarious negotiations, and the many bookmarks created, were the conditions which gave the exhibition both its form and its content and, like most exhibitions, were about existential social collisions occur- ring during the project’s existence rather than in some way representing a purity of artistic expression.
This was multi-functional gate keeping, an unusual range of responsibilities, but not 25 uncommon these days I suggest, when social infrastructure, the stuff we call ‘a culture’, is subordinated to social efficiency, as expressed by the bottom line of the current account.
The dissemination of multimedia art into public spaces including museums and galler- ies is a responsibility that cannot be taken solely by institutions and curators. It is a broader social responsibility that value-adds the social infrastructure in the areas of knowledge development, knowledge delivery and knowledge effect.
Knowledges Knowledge development in this context is creating the conditions for artists and other knowledge workers to ‘value-add’ the ‘ideas stream’ as distinct from the ‘money stream’.
The task that must also be value-added is the means by which outcomes from the ideas stream are applicable to knowledge delivery. Clearly outcomes from artists cannot be guaranteed, but the majority of work emerging from the studios can be delivered to the appropriate audience. Some work can even be placed in the public setting, and it would then address in some way, each of the art world audiences described earlier.
During a Panel Session at the International Symposium for Electronic Art in 1996, four of us who have been working in different ways on the delivery of artists’ researches gave some guide to knowledge effect through the different strategies employed to locate and engage new and established audiences.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 61 • Film and Video Umbrella10, a London based group headed by Stephen Bode spoke at the panel session about the kind of work Umbrella were undertaking in the mid-90s. This London based organisation had been operating for nearly ten years with funding from the Arts Council of England and had concentrated on researching and curating exhibits of work by British artists working with film, video and digital media. In Britain, artists’ film and video had encountered institutional inertia from its first appearance in the late-60s. Though various artists’ support organisations had assisted individuals to mount screenings and exhibitions of their work, it was uncoordinated at best and dissipated at worst. Bode’s presentation covered the logistics of running such an organisation and detailed a major exhibit held in 1995 at the Natural History Mu- seum in London, one of several non-art institutions with which the Umbrella had enabled artists access to existing resources and different audiences, who would for instance, encounter science ‘content’ within a interactive multimedia space.
• Another speaker at the session was Annick Bureaud, President of Art Science Technology Network Inc (ASTN) which publishes FineArt Forum, and editor of the International Directory of Electronic Arts (IDEA)11. She spoke in relation to a consul- tancy she had recently com- pleted for the French Ministry of Culture about the future for museums and their object- based structures, their archi- 26 tecture, the intellectual patterns of the staff. She raised the issues of: ‘cultural worth’ in relation to the space available for creation; the narrativisation effect of art histori- cal traditions; the novelty of technology in some contexts, for instance science muse- ums, avoiding content problems associated with time-based media. Artists’ fees and commissions in this area needed urgent attention. Curatorial practices of themes and surveys needed to give account to the flexibility of forms that electronic media pro- duced, which in itself raised problems of conservation for museum culture. Flexibility was the key for the future, along the lines of theatre possibly. The Ars Electronica Centre (opened in 1997) could become a model for such an approach.
• Jill Scott is an Australian artist based in Germany and after working in the mediums of video and performance she began working with digital installations in the mid-80s and during 1996 completed the massive interactive installation, Frontiers of Utopia (1996). She described in detail the plans for the ‘hybrid’ museum (that opened during 1997), at Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien (ZKM) in Karlsruhe under the director- ship of Hans Peter Schwartz and used the Web site that described the exhibit to illus- trate her points.12 Here was to be a centre for knowledge, she demonstrated, that merged the virtual and the real whether the visitor was at the Museum in Karlsruhe, or on-line in another part of the globe.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 62 27 • My work on Burning the Interface
Each part of the process had a bearing not only on the work that was selected but also on the way it was presented. An exhibition of work on CD-ROM for instance, is not just a matter of loading the discs onto the computers. Though most artists had intended for the work to be seen by one or two people sitting half a metre from the monitor screen and a mouse with which to guide the work, some artists had used the CD-ROM simply as a storage device. This required, quite reasonably, the work to be encountered within a specially constructed installation involving a data projector and sound sys- tem.
All the work in Burning the Interface employed sound, as does most multimedia works. It was this critical element that most deter- mined the show’s design appearance and function and hence the setting in which the work was re- ceived. The exhibition manager, Louise Pether, and the designer, Colin Rowan, approached the 28 use of the galleries with design elements that would deliver the best possible sound quality, without carry-over to nearby interactive stations.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 63 A T-shaped plinth was designed to contain within its base the computer proc- essor box and keyboard, the monitor and mouse being placed on the top surface. Sound came through a grille in this surface and radiated upwards towards an acoustic panel that hung from the ceiling, two metres above the plinth. In the acousti- cally hostile space of a white cube galleries, together 29 with careful setting of sound levels and judicious use of headphones, this sound deliv- ery system protected the artists’ intentions, the bottom line for the exhibition.
The MCA curator Linda Michael and I determined that a non-intrusive approach to providing explanatory material was critical to visitors’ engagement with the exhibits and ability to understand a little about the genesis of the work. The walls of the white cubes were used to display, at intersections, technical and factual explanation and guidance, short interpretations of computer-screen icons employed in interactive work, and the appearance of the actual discs and accompanying packaging. ‘Tip-sheets’ at each interactive station provided assistance with navigation and a copy of the cata- logues gave access to artists’ statements and three essays related to the exhibition.
This dynamic approach to contextualising the exhibi- tion was complemented by the education department of the Museum organising talks by artists with work in the show, together with writers, teachers and other commentators. Various groups from education, industry and government made formal visits which clearly for some was not only their first encounter 30 with media art, but also the first chance to see what ‘interactive multimedia’ and the ‘information superhighway’ amounted to, given the column inches devoted to the subject since the publication of Creative Nation eighteen months previously.14
The “major event .... the first international exhibition of digital works of art on cd-rom” (Gauguet 1998) was an initial attempt to describe with some passion, the contained explosion that had occurred between 1992 and 1995 amongst artists in the countries
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 64 advanced with information technology, to re-utilise the tools being developed by the software industry and re-purpose a newish hardware tool, the CD-ROM burner, to dis- tribute the outcome of their labours.15
The creative utilisation of information technology in the workplace, the home and the games arcade was the broader context in which the event was received, and the range of uses to which the technology was put by artists. “The focus of the exhibition thus lies broadly in the ‘experimental’ area - where open-ended projects are commenced and where conclusions are not necessarily reached.” 16
Two of the computers in the show were connected to the World Wide Web, and enabled some comparisons to be made between the off-line work in the galleries, and the early potential of more ephemeral on-line experiments. The relative ease of exhibiting on the Web, indeed of moving the studio and its processes into an on-line space, seemed to be the nirvana that many contemporary artists were seeking. For some, the whole process of submitting to the curatorial process, the often continuing demands from the exhibiting institution where work was requested, and the perceived over determined responses by out-of-touch critics was gladly given away in exchange for the Web, the ‘newest medium’. Liberté du parole!
Media Formats The nature of the technology being utilised by artists is one which is itself in a con- stant state of flux - each month there is another software release or new piece of hardware which is capable of revealing a whole new vista of possibilities, (of which for instance, the Apple Quicktime series of movie playback software has been quite funda- mental to the development of artists’ multimedia). Technical developments in hardware and software enables an artist to make a work that, whilst directly exploiting the features a new tool provides, can also manage to create a cogent and valid artwork. Even with media formats that have been around for a few years, such as CD-ROM, some work is actually characterised, if not constrained, by the particularities of the medium.
The “multiplicity of interactions in electronic spaces” in the contemporary scene can be outlined and are critical factors in the work that emerges:
a) CD-ROM is the medium that enables artists to conveniently transport their work from the production computer to another computer for an audience to experi- ence.17 Whilst all computers currently are able to play CD-ROM, the complex and infe- rior Windows platform used by 90% of computers is not the production choice of the majority of artists.18 Together with public inertia towards this new and expensive means of leisure time activity, except among those professionally engaged in the field, enthusiasm for this most recent art medium remains restricted. The ‘first batch’ of artists’ CD-ROM titles appeared in 1994/5 immediately prior to Burning the Interface. A ‘second batch’ is currently appearing during 1998/9, some of which incorporate another medium, the World Wide Web.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 65 b) The Web, or WWW (World Wide Web) is the graphical bowser part of the Internet and as such, is the ‘instant’ gallery of many artists dreams. Though the rent for the space is low, finding an audience is another matter. A major advantage though is that the Web can function as a kind of permanent ‘work in progress’ site, where sketches and components are exhibited or trialed interactively before they are placed into a larger or more complex work delivered via CD-ROM - the technical capacity of the Web to carry multimedia is strictly limited - and as such the Web is invaluable to curators for monitoring the development of new work as well as researching work that has already been exhibited. So called ‘virtual reality’, or interactive 360˚ 3D real-time rendering, (including Virtual Reality Markup Language - VRML, and Web 3D), is a tech- nology being enthusiastically explored by many artists.
c) On-line exhibitions are more formally organised Web sites, with high quality and fast technology supporting them and a strategy in place for bringing the exhibi- tion to the attention of an audience. (The Web is a very big and lonely place for an individual artist’s site - think of a postage stamp floating in the Pacific!) Besides being properly funded with budgets similar to those in the corporate sector, sites can be linked to key sites to help funnel an audience toward the exhibition site. The work is often by mid-career artists whose work is written about and discussed.
The Walker Art Centre SHOCK19 + listserv forum has been an energetic approach to combining an object in a gallery with an object on a website and, utilising the listserv, enables visitors to auto critique the exhibition across the range of interests present. Responses may be to the curatorial initiative, or indeed the works themselves, or the tangential issues that the exhibition might ignite amongst the participating audience. As Dr Kevin Murray has observed; “Criticism native to the Web is proceeding as we speak. Your inbox is now filling up with email from various lists announcing new sites and appending theoretical expositions. Anyone can participate and any subject is permissible.”20
d) Installation work incorporates digital technology, often seamlessly, into the full range of contemporary activity. The utilisation of advanced programming as a means of computer mediated control of electro-mechanical constructions within the field of robotics and sculpture, has impacted upon the contemporary scene over the last ten years. Less sophisticated use of the technology has at least enabled artists to move away from the drear sight of the furniture of video monitors and instead have access to the more flexible data projector and the dynamic sizes and shapes of pro- jected image it can produce.
e) Game and Arcade Consuls often make appearances in exhibitions in the same way as a film or television program may be referenced for the specific cultural message they carry. There have not been many survey shows of this cultural phenomenon, which is strange given the ubiquity of the form and the dynamics of its specific aesthetic demanding the compression of vast amounts of specially designed and adapted sound and picture data into very small memory storage spaces.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 66 f) 2D works on paper, vinyl and most other surfaces, generated from a huge range of output devices including dye-sublimation, ink jet, plotter, laser etc. whilst capable of imitating the physical appearance of accepted heritage items such as drawings, prints and photographs, can also be utilised to produce massive-sized images capable of covering an office tower.
g) 3D object making using processes that convert the virtual object on the computer monitor into an exact replica, (in resin most often), is an advanced outcome of using the computer to develop sculptural concepts. The use of CAD-CAM (computer aided design-computer aided manufacture) has enabled some artists to dispense with the workshop entirely and instead supply plans to fabricators.
h) Performance art has developed approaches to new work using motion detect- ing, movement following technologies, and options whereby the audience can provide input to movement, sound or text-based performance work. Camera and touchpad sensors extend the physical presence, remote sensing, the use of ISDN and internet connections, the spatial zone of presence and representation.
Practices What is the range of ‘new media’ practice being developed at the moment by practi- tioners, and how might the outcomes move from the specialist exhibition venues to enter larger public spaces and interface with a wider audience? The categories reflect the critical development of specific technologies within the broad category misnomer of ‘new media’, currently being so eagerly explored by both emerging and established artists. The connections between the development of the technology by computer specialists, their interaction and non-interaction with artists from various back- grounds, and the adaptation of tools by various artists to achieve various outcomes, are therefore only briefly inferred.
Outlined below is a short survey of studio practice by broad category, with consider- able areas of overlap and hybridisation, the purpose of which is to begin to identify the range that needs to be presented to the audience, and also aid in the planning of resources and the ability to select and exhibit to those various audiences described earlier. The area is clearly too large now to usefully provide examples of individual artists.
a) Artificial Life: a very vigorous area of current research by artists with ad- vanced skills in software programming, with access to enhanced resources and facili- ties capable of creating real-time rendered 3D animation. Working in the computer game technology area, artists eschew the archetypal and paranoid obsessive narratives and instead mimic carbon-based life forms nonetheless unrestrained in their nature of behaviours. These often provide access points to guide the growth of entities within their digital domains and even provide out-of-body immersive experiences.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 67 b) Cyborgs, Avatars, Agents are the Simulacra of another vigorous area, the non- gendered, the prosthetic, the anthropomorphic meme, spawned from the Artificial Life (AL) laboratory and crossing over into other practices, most notably digital communi- ties and performance, where as symbolic beings they exist in digital and flesh-like forms, remote, autonomous or closely linked to human initiators.
c) Digital Communities : working in a variety of ways and manifestations on the Web - DigiCity, Recode, Rhizome, MOOS and MUDS etc., an area of sometimes vigorous interface between issues, passions, personalities (both real and imagined), discourse and inane banter. This area is particularly appropriate to the curational (and conserva- tionist) process as there is a thin dividing line between the notion of work in progress and work on exhibition, much of the activity being truly ephemeral and indeed, ap- pearing and then disappearing from the screens without warning. Related to this are internet specific manifestations, from listserv communities to random and organised linking between ‘gamers’, intent upon strategies that compete for supremacy in ‘situa- tion fantasies’ involving mayhem and virtual destruction.
d) Writing: text + image : individual, collaborative, collective, communal experi- ments which though yet to have an impact on a wider public, (other than ‘the new art of email correspondence’), like many other things on the Net, is quietly exploring possibilities and potential. The field is split between the derriere-garde literati access- ing and proffering their favoured texts and the avant-garde, hypertextualising collec- tively produced magnum opus’s and hyperlinking every known word of every known language.
e) Digital video technologies are having a major impact on the way artists are thinking about not just production, post-production and distribution strategies but also within the next ten years, their impact on current television programming and modes of reception for erstwhile linear media.
f) Digital Special Effects (DFX) is an area of the entertainment arts that has many resources for development and production poured into it as does the games market. The public’s fascination with ‘cinema/TV magic’ cannot be overstated, (and many artists are associated with it as a means of earning a living). Romeo and Juliet (minimal) to Deep Impact (maximal).
g) the games market, both arcades and CD-ROMs, is a much bigger earner than cinema, (though cinema is often important in the cross-marketing of both), and many games are ‘worked out’ on Macs and PCs before being recoded and burnt into chips for Ninetendos and Sega etc. There are some artists associated with this area and clearly, as with manga, has generated a massive following and a significant aesthetic worthy of many a PhD thesis.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 68 h) the ‘post-modern and conceptual garden’ category of production develops out of the ‘traditions’ of contemporary art practice and whilst utilising digital media and being open to the unique possibilities of the medium, is less driven by its specifically digital ‘nature’ and more concerned with the ideas which are being explored and exposited, freely using non-digital resources and materials in conjunction with some element of computer mediation.
j) Performance as a live and interactive encounter between performers, audience and digital media are being explored in a variety of ways in several national centres. The encounter may run ‘formally’ as installations in a performance space, or informally in the street through more hybrid installations which enable, in often unresolved ways, interaction via the internet. The sense that this becomes intrusions into streetlife, observed and measured by a hidden surveillance camera, exemplifies the confronta- tional, and can attenuate an attempt at communication of a most basic kind, a prereq- uisite for even the most experiential museum.
Exhibition Formats Central to the purpose of ‘formatting’ or designing approaches to exhibiting is the need to recognise the value of curation as part of the process of knowledge delivery by providing a framework and context to enable engagement with often quite disparate artworks. The description of the exhibition through catalogue design, enables remote audiences to participate, and allows discretion by local audiences.
Having outlined some of the areas in which artists are working and the kind of tools and formats with which they are working brings us to the kind of critical approaches the exhibiting institution might take to curating and presenting the work. Such pro- posals could include:
a) Media: an exhibition based upon the medium of delivery, such as CD-ROM, as in Burning the Interface. At this point in time, now there is more work available, it becomes possible to curate a selection based on advancing a particular theme or context.
b) Survey: this approach to exhibitions of art have dominated the scene thus far. Besides Burning the Interface, there has been a significant handful of shows which have concentrated on surveying the output of Australian media artists: Experimenta, Alternative Realities, dArt, Cyber Cultures, techné, and others planned such as the Digital Art Awards, Futurscreen, etc. An international survey, (like Burning the Inter- face, or the annual ISEA exhibition, or ZKM Medienkunst), though desirable can be as expensive to undertake, research properly and to mount, as can be any other interna- tional exhibition of art.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 69 c) Individual monographs of ‘world-class’ artists are less expensive to research but are similarly expensive to mount unless their sponsor/ collector/corporate backer wish to contribute. The other problem is, does the audience know these artists suffi- ciently to want to experience their work? Marketing individual artists, unless they are popular, is more fraught than selling the public a chance to experience something new and ‘different’.
d) Technology linkages between the commercial exploitation of a particular technology and the artists use of it. For instance, digital video effects (DFX) compa- nies produce outcomes which essentially address different audiences from the gallery goer. But by bringing together various combinations of the outcomes of work of artists and companies could be of interest to both.
e) Modern Histories of artists using media technology. Given the speed at which one technology is being replaced by another, in the relatively short period of 20 years, a whole strand of work can be rendered unviewable. With the rapid migration of video from reel-to-reel, to U-matic, to SVHS, to Hi8, to Betacam, and now DVD, much of the work made in the ’70s on video is now lost. Whilst for some this may be cause for celebration, it nonetheless breaks the lineage of work and discourse current at the time of a work’s appearance, making study and re-assessment chancy and open to blatant speculation. History survey shows may have to happen more often given the lack of conservation strategies in the media technology area. Electronic catalogues on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM may contain the only extent versions of works whose means of reproduction in the original form have been lost, through a continual process of copy- ing, a la Fahrenheit 451.21
f) Theme shows centred on ‘the experience’, or ‘the image’, or ‘the subject’ can be as fraught as any other survey show for much the same reason - often a lot of re- sources are needed in one space at one time. However, the rewards to visitors can be enormous as was demonstrated by the alignment of Burning the Interface and Phantas- magoria in adjacent MCA galleries in 1996.
Strategies The spectre of the museum as a sculptural shell into which the musty remnants of earlier ages are placed was in question at the Site-Time-Media-Space seminar held in November 1998.22 The experiences of museum specialists who work with media tech- nologies and the research of artists who develop them, was the substance of this seven hour seminar.
“Garrulous media installations...” was far from Ian Wedde’s mind when, as Concept Curator Humanities for the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongerewa, which opened during 1998, he was part of the large team who sought to “find, win and grow a new audience” for Our Place where the collections were to be utilised as a unified resource. Facing It is the section of Te Papa that commissioned media art from around the world.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 70 In a series of extended apologies to potential Australian contributors whose email had gone unanswered, Wedde outlined the roller-coaster that he had ridden for the past years around “the rocks of management”. The curator as heroic figure emerged, as contracts were issued to the lucky few “to extend artists’ practice and placing risk- management at the feet of the institution”.
The complex issue of resourcing specific media projects emerged at Te Papa. Bricks, concrete and salaries are less of a problem than accessing the technology and project budgets. Wedde advocated “relationship brokerage” as the method by which artists, institution and sponsor could collaborate to produce museum outcomes.
Within existing public spaces, several strategies can be adopted to give the audience access to the outcomes of media artists’ labours.
a) In a dedicated space, custom designed to take account of all conceivable technical configurations that may be required it becomes possible to maintain a con- tinuous exhibition of digital work, probably one or two works at a time, changed over according to program demands and resources. This option could require considerable resources to initiate but once established, require much less to maintain. The option would maintain the institution’s involvement in and connection with contemporary activity in the field on a regular basis.
b) In a general gallery space considerable effort would be needed to equip the exhibition since an exhibition event would probably include between ten and twenty pieces of work. The publicity to launch the event would be considerable and to justify the investment the exhibition would have to have a run of months rather than weeks, as in alternative a).
c) A project space, which deliberately emphasises the process of creating “the multiplicity of interactions” (through integrated educational projects for instance) utilising the modest levels of equipment and facilities that most institutions can afford and maintain.
Conclusions I have outlined the relationship between some of the outcomes of knowledge research and knowledge delivery - there are others - and related these to the restricted opportu- nities for gauging audience response. Ascott’s ‘multiplicity of interactions’ may well only successfully occur, as he suggests, solely in electronic spaces, not subject to the agendas of institutions, the tyranny of interlocutors and the constraints of architec- ture.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 71 As Aurora Lovelock has observed: “The problematic of cyber space versus museum space is surely the confusion of their inherent topologys within the specific topography of ‘site’. Why should these spatial topologies currently, if ever, ‘mix well’? ... Traditionally, the museum has been a designated place where classification and curation have been practised to create a sense of cultural invariance and continuity within a site-specific architecture and with ‘discontinuous’ art objects. The preservation and analysis of arte- facts gives the illusion of permanence as well as an underlying order of value.
Paradoxically, in the digital context, the invariance and continuity which is provided by the underlying logic of the digital computer does not automatically give rise to a sense of permanence and value. In fact the opposite occurs. ... Sequential planning, a set of instructions, belongs to topology. In the context of the museum that means sets of objects, the “Japanese Ceramics Collection”, a topology of relationships related to the architecture of the site; the promenade or the panopticon. Alternatively on the CD-Rom, or in the networked ‘virtual museum’, data objects can be classified through simultane- ous ‘nodes’ of access.”23
The design of knowledge delivery and method of access is crucial to understanding the distinction between museum topology, which sets out to propose a rational connection between objects and history, essentially a project of methodology, and museum revela- tion which through the act of provision gives access to the more dynamic and specula- tive project of contemporary media art that seeks a multiplicity of interactions, and is a part of the wider process of knowledge development.24
There is clearly much to be developed in public spaces and the institutions which create public spaces, in relation to the new media that artists will begin to work with almost as soon as the technology appears. This is no surprise. The development of tools and techniques and the development of ideas is the flux in which artists move. In this time of speed, what needs to be questioned is the structures that place the conservative nature of the museum professionals in the space between the audience and the rapidly changing domain of the media artist.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 72 Notes for Part Five
1 Channel Four Television UK, who commissioned this piece, was responsible through the work of Alan Fountain and Rod Stoneman of advancing, during the 80s, the work of artists working through the medium of television, following a prolonged campaign through the 70s by the film-makers themselves lobbying through the Independent Film-makers Association (IFA). 2 At the beginning of 1999, the situation in Australia is a case of two steps forward and one back. New media forum and archiving projects are pressing ahead in Melbourne (Cinemedia) and Brisbane (Griffith Artworks) whilst in Sydney, the Museum of Contemporary Art, through the termination of David Watson’s position as Cinematheque Co-ordinator, has not only put the MCA’s claim to the word contemporary into doubt but also relinquished an animateur with the very qualities needed to establish a moving image depart- ment: knowledge, determination and passion. 3 Other Spaces (Dixon 1997), a Report on the marketing, distri- bution and exhibition of interactive art was commissioned by the Australian Film Commission from Rachel Dixon and published in October 1997 and is a useful source book for this area. The collated data and opinion unfortunately obscures the complex polemics and the broader strategies that need to be embraced. 4 This section of the thesis is based on talks and presentations given at the following events: ISEA96, Rotterdam: Panel Session Chair Digital Media and Public Spaces, September 1996; Art- Iculations conference, PICA, Perth, February 1997; Key Centre for Media and Culture Policy Research seminar, Griffith University, May 1997; (Cracking the) Binary Code conference, CCP at Interact97, Melbourne, November 1997; The Cyber Frontier: the Digital Future: the 5th International Documentary Conference, Brisbane, November 1997; Australian Film Commission, Industry and Cultural Develop- ment branch seminar: ‘Exhibiting Digital Media, December 1997; ‘Microwave exhibition of contemporary artists’ CD-ROM: Videotage International Video Art Festival, Hong Kong, December 1997. With grateful acknowledgments to David Watson. 5 Smith, Trevor, paper New Times, New Spaces, Art of Sight, Art of Mind, National Assocation for the Visual Arts national conference, Sydney December 1998. 6 Now Professor Noel Frankham, Head of School, South Australia School of Art. 7 Email correspondence with Noel Frankham, October 1998. 8 John MacDonald in the Sydney Morning Herald, May 1996 9 “killer app” or killer application is computer industry jargon referring to a computer software application which will catch the imagination of the public and sell a lot of copies. This does not always benefit the inventor of the application, as Macintosh Comput- ers discovered with their WYSIWYG operating system, (the result of programmers and artists working together) which was used as the basis of a clumsy and inferior operating system (Microsoft Windows) that has since captured, through market domination, 90% of compu- ter users world-wide.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 73 10 www.beyond2000.co.uk/ 11 http://nunc.com/ 12 www.zkm.de/ 13 See more in Artlines 1/4 1996. 14 The Federal Government 1995 cultural policy statement from the ALP/Keating administration. In spite of relentless pursuit, in collaboration with both NAVA and the MCA, of some of the funds that the Federal government had announced in Dept of Communication and Arts documents that it wished to spend in the area of digital media exhibitions, none was forthcoming. The Australian Film Com- mission conversely was generous in its diligent support for the exhibition and later, in its touring version. 15 In addition, three publications within the exhibition, artintact, Mediamatic and Artifice, showed that serious attempts were being made to provide regular channels for niche distribution of artists’ work to occur. By 1999, little further progress has been achieved. 16 Leggett, Mike & Michael, Linda; Introduction ; Burning the Interface catalogue. 17 Discussed in Leggett, Mike; CD-ROM - the 21st Century Bronze?: ibid 18 Of the 130 works submitted to Burning the Interface, only four used the Windows platform. 19 www.walkerart.org/salons/shockoftheview/ The listserv forum is an internet tool enabling registered contributors to read and reply to submitted email messages (posts) around a particular broad topic (for example, exhibiting digital media) whilst pursuing particular lines of research or debate (threads). It is similar to newsgroups (for which registration is not a pre-requisite) and is open to intervention by anyone at anytime. 20 Letters: Net-art and the argument for critical decompression: RealTime/28, Dec 1998. 21 Fahrenheit 451, the Louise Malle film of 1972 based on the book by Ray Bradbury in which great works of literature are, by decree, protected from destruction by fire by being returned to the oral tradition of story-telling, mouth to ear, generation to generation. The title of the book/film refers to the temperature at which paper combusts. 22 Site-Time-Media-Space - New Media in Museums, 17/18th November 1998, convened by the Creative Director of CDP Media, Gary Warner, prime media designer for the Museum of Sydney where the seminar was held. Full report by Mike Leggett in RealTime/28, Decem- ber 1998. 23 Lovelock, Aurora, [shock] listserv forum item, (abridged) Nov 1998. 24 See Part Six: SonteL
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 74 Part Six SonteL Interactive CD-ROM prototype
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 75 Part Six: SonteL
What is it that make interactive multimedia a potent tool in the range of mediums with which the artist has to work?
To summarise aspects of digital technology:
• it is a technology which is ubiquitous, available in 1999 in any high street in the land, in a range of specifications to suit a range of budgets - sec- ond-hand equipment is plentiful and could enable an artist to establish a basic studio for as little as one week’s basic minimum wage.
• the technology is physically compact and requires little studio space.
• the multimedia artwork produced likewise occupies little physical space and because it is easily transportable, either on CD-ROM or via computer net- works such as the internet, can provide access to the work itself rather than documentation of it.
• the multimedia artwork, if completed correctly, has a physical immutability which protects it from interference or damage, and by its very ubiquity and ease of duplication, moves it away from becoming a unique and ‘precious’ object requiring special security measures when made accessible to the audience.
To summarise aspects of multimedia practice:
• multimedia brings together a range of media skills (the so-called conver- gence factor) and otherwise separated disciplinary skills to enable the production of integrated statements employing a range of ‘media image’ options.
• as a digitally based medium, the acquisition, manipulation and duplication of ‘media images’ is not impeded by the need for distinct procedures or seperated processes, these are integrated, most often, onto the same desktop platform or operating system.
• being a time-based medium, multimedia offers options for the artist to develop forms of addressing the audience - the interface - which encourage individual responses, or interaction, and thus full participation in the experiential and meaning-making processes.
• audiences for multimedia art can be addressed in a wide range of venues, from street to gallery to the kitchen table.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 76 The multimedia interface is the potential location of empowerment, where responsive- ness and intervention is usually required and often rewarded. The interface, in its broadest sense, being where the artwork itself, the experience of art, is centred. Through the active processes of interaction and immersion, the subject’s incorporation into the artwork tends to subsume intentionality or manipulation by the artist as outcome. This openness to the experiential, often eschewing the interpretive, defines the subject’s ‘role’ within the artwork as of fundamental importance. The representa- tion of time/space is central to the ‘unsettling’ of narrative cinematic space, order and sequence.
SonteL If the modernist project attacked the separation apparent between form and content, (a view that created false distinctions within a work and helped create in the viewer or readers mind an illusion of wholeness and unity), then ‘interactive multimedia’ could be claimed to be a tool that, a priori, maintains ‘content’ at a distance, requiring an active participation by the viewer or reader in the making of the work. Whether this then delivers to the participant a vivid experience that assails the senses, or a pro- found encounter that imparts wisdom and knowledge, is wholly dependent on the active engagement of the ‘interactor’ with the imagination of the work’s maker.
SonteL is the working title of an interactive multimedia work, a prototype on CD-ROM which sets out to test and, as outcomes of the investigation, demonstrate issues of legibility and comprehension within this medium. Whilst examining means of enriching the experience of interacting with such a work, issues related to the conveyance of knowledge from within the work are engaged. It seeks to test that ground where knowledge is imparted in a way that is both vivid and pleasurable.
The 10-page proposal submitted to the Australian Film Commission1 in the course of seeking seed funding for the project is reproduced as Appendix B, (Strangers on the Land ). A comparison could be made between the notes that follow and the content of that proposal to take account of the shifts that have occurred between the project’s inception and where it has reached as prototype, a copy of which is contained in this
31
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 77 thesis. Appendix C is a copy of the project development proposal submitted to the AFC some months after this part-way point to completion and describes in succinct form the major changes proposed that would shape the form and content of the final work. By this time the title of the project had developed to become PathScape - pathways through an Australian landscape.
Proposal The seed-funding proposal for SonteL was developed over a two- year period. It followed on, as these things often do, from a chance encounter with a small booklet purchased in a holiday town’s bookshop. The booklet outlined the history of that part of the South Coast of New South Wales, commencing with notes from Capt Cook’s Endeavour Journal in which he noted observing ‘figures on 32 a beach’. The beach was the same one that I and my family had visited regularly for the previous 15 years and formed an image in my mind of the people had used the beach in the millennia before the pass- ing of the barque Endeavour. The little booklet of course, made no reference to the earlier occupation of the land, reflecting an almost neurotic state of denial, broadly held, that has only in recent years become vigorously challenged.
An initial proposal for seed-funding entitled Figures on a Beach was badly mis-under- stood at its assessment, a result of insufficient consulting on my part, the writer, and inexact reading by the Film Commission consultant. However, as a result of the feed- back from this assessment, it was the first step in a process that began to truly de- velop the project, through a process of enrichment by the involvement of several other artists and professionals.
The second proposal entitled Strangers on the Land not only clarified the aims of the project but also re-designed the basic interface which would enable ‘interactors’ to enjoy the experience of the encounter but also access, as an option, the stories that contained knowledge about the images with which the viewer would engage.
The Synopsis of the project describes the general nature of investigating an interface that could be used for accessing different ‘content databases’, as well as the more specific purpose of addressing the narratives pertinent to the landscapes of the South Coast.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 78 Production The proposal was successful in attaining the seed-funding budget of $35,000 and towards the end of 1998 a team of five other artists and professionals began work. The production schedule was to be part-time, cover a period of six months, and required that people be prepared to work for a base-line daily rate of $175.00.2
A total of 130 person/days were allocated from within the budget to cover the produc- tion of the prototype to ‘proof of concept’ stage such that a demonstration could take place on a mid-level power computer using either the Macintosh or Windows operating systems. Image acquisition was the first major task undertaken by myself and occurred through the summer months utilising a stills digital camera.
33
Initial navigational and interface constructed by Adam Hinshaw using the Macromedia Director 7.0 authoring software was gradually tested and modified, in consultation with Brad Miller.
The images being gathered with the digital camera by myself were delivered to Alex Davies for incorporation into two areas of the navigational structure - the ‘track’ for- wards and backwards movement (East to West and back again), and the ‘morphed pans’, which at various specific points, displayed a panning action through 360˚ (ei- ther to the left or to the right). As these were completed they were assembled into position throughout the autumn period of 1999.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 79 Research by Kathryn Wells involved the finding and acquisition of images and texts from historical archives, and meetings with many people, both indigenous and non- indigenous, in the geographical area.
Sound acquisition by Bruno Koenig occurred throughout the same period, with a large number of sound files being created and revised ready for delivery towards an end of May deadline.
Communication was main- tained throughout this period between myself and the various crew members, mainly using email, and through meetings which happened on one evening a week. Whilst individuals worked to project deadlines, the point at which the work was done responded to the priorities operating around there other engagements. It can only be left to the imagination as to how this 34 artwork, SonteL, might have been substantially different, if it and other projects of a similar speculative nature had access to the resources enjoyed by corporate and commercial production teams, which enable a production period free of other commitments.
Completion The process of production quite obviously when dealing with a plastic medium, besides testing some of the concepts described in the proposal document, developed further ideas, as well as clarifying the overall concept.
To begin with, the title had changed. The working title acronymic SonteL had replaced the larger mouthful, Strangers on the Land. The combination of the sound ‘son’ (as in song) with ‘tel’ (as in tell), seemed to describe quite perfectly one of the major as- pects being investigated - how to impart or tell about knowledge, in the spirit of a song. Whilst much knowledge was unearthed about the South Coast area, almost too much, the means of conveying much of this was through the device of narrator or witness, ‘giving voice’3 to the histories emerging from a flow of narrative images.
During the process of giving the project its sound - the ‘sounding’ process - the dis- tinctions between the natural world and the ‘world of mankind’ became even more apparent. Besides operating at a more primal level than our over refined sense of sight, sound has the illusionistic capacity to isolate association and meaning from the background. In some ways it is more precise in describing a place than the visual
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 80 image of that place.4 We stand in the rainforest and hear the sound of the wind in the trees and the sound of a bellbird - we are ‘there’. We “peer at a monitor” and see only an impression of the rainforest, and we cannot ‘see’ the bellbird. The dimensions of sound, particularly in the stereo mode, (which this prototype is not), will become more essential in a full-scale version.
The synopsis for the project was rewritten, not to change the intention of the project but rather to clarify its description in the light of active research and practical out- comes:
“SonteL examines Landscape as the mediated image, central to the beliefs and identity within Australian culture both indigenous and non-indigenous. Through a dynamic and interactive process of presentation, intersections are made with interpretations and mediations about The Land, its many appearances, its many histories.”
The juxtaposition of place and related viewpoint in support of the above statement was demonstrated in the prototype to function successfully. The depiction of the Landscape was felt by some to be ‘too abstract’, requiring ‘a map’ or some means by which the interactor could orientate themselves into the topography that was represented. This viewpoint seemed to not only deny post-Cubist spatial representation and reaffirm the Cartesian principle, but echo the descrip- tion in one of the narratives that relates the surveyor’s story. Here the empirical project that was eventually to ‘map the Empire’ in mid-19th Century finally reached the South Coast parish of Benenduruh, and thereby, in the name of 35 the vertical arrowhead, dispossessed “a culture based on the inclusive principle of commonality” and replaced it with “ a con- temporary law based on the exclusive principles of private property”.5
‘The prototype interactive has been re-assessed by myself and the others in the team after a two to three-month period elapsed, prior to submitting a further proposal to the AFC to take the project further forward. This will enable us to, quite literally, complete the walk in the landscape from the sea to the ranges (and by looking back from the ranges to the sea thereby ‘complete the loop’), but also discover and relate more of the stories associated with this coastal section of Australia. Whilst at times in the piece it is possible to realise which ‘actual places on a map’ are represented, the landscape that is described is a much less specific, more generic place.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 81 The huge advantage of having achieved a prototype ‘visualisation’ of a concept is that there is something tangible to show, even if it encourages people to say that they ‘were lost’ on the walk, or disagree with the inclusion of some story or other. The process of group interaction around the prototype, particularly with indigenous people with whom the project has developed a relationship, will reveal misconceptions on the part of the authors and provide unexpected solutions to perceived problems.
The navigational precept presented in the prototype has been re-visited. The orienta- tion of the subject within this virtual space is not so much the issue here - part of working with any interactive multimedia piece is about orientating within it.6 But how knowledge is accessed, the indicators that flag the options for knowledge rather than ‘more experience’, are most important. Whilst in the current prototype version it is not a requirement ‘to take the didactic path’, since it is possible to enjoy the virtual walk and the things you see and hear on the way, the ‘virtual places’ in which the telling occurs and the signs that are given to indicate some options are available, have been revised. 7 The screen space around the central image which moves the view from one Zone to the next will be used to signal the Nodes which access the narratives. Likewise the screen space around the central image of the ‘morphing pan’ will indicate with a part visible image, or colour, the ‘availability’ of a narrative.
At the completion of a narrative, whether accessed from a Zone or from a Node, the options offered (the Objects) will, besides offering further narrative, include a Source and/or Index function which will enable users to explore the Content of the work as a resource tool enabling quick access to specific stories and the images and texts associ- ated with them. From here, rather than the previous level, the pre-structured boolian queries for a Web search engine will be launched.
With access to the enhanced resources being proposed, control of the movement between these levels of engagement with the work, with modified coding, will be given to the user, instead of through the use of ‘timeout’ periods to drop the user back to a previous level.
Content development from the prototype as detailed in Appendix C will include:
• closer working and consultation with the Ulladula Land Council whose country borders onto the area being documented; • interface programming that will enable the direct reproduction of still images (‘on-the-fly’) rather than through the film emulation tool of Premiere, which will lead to much improved image quality within the narratives as well as quantities of narratives; • whilst retaining the basic concept of design a much richer sound environment utilising more sound variation and stereo reproduction; • a wider range of speakers’ voices, both documented and reading prepared texts; • extended research of narrative material enabling the creation of a greater quan- tity, and also a selection of stories which more carefully follow the precepts of the project treatment.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 82 Finally The term interactive has been at the centre of the concept of this investigation, certainly as a thread within the thesis com- ponent. At a practical level, both in the development and curation of the exhibition, Burning the Interface
Notes for Part Six 1 The Australian Film Commission had made a very early interven- tion into digital media (see Part Two, New Tools) and throughout the 1990s against significant government and industry pressure, main- tained a policy of encouraging and providing resources for ‘intelligent experimentation’ with this new medium, primarily for people with a visual and sound arts background. At the time of writing, the AFC were under enormous pressure to collapse various screen culture infrastructure and experimental production initiatives into the film industry’s black hole of feature film ‘script development’. 2 At this point in time, work in most areas of the multimedia industry was paid at more than twice that amount, considerably more for individuals with talents, such as programmer, who were in short supply. 3 ‘giving voice’ was an expression used by the indigenous film- maker Richard Franklyn to describe the setting-up of an indigenous website in Victoria during 1998. 4 Pure Vanity section from Image ConText:One (1979) - see Appendix A: Filmography. 5 SonteL (1999) 6 I discuss this at length in the section entitled Navigating Levels of Meaning, in Part Three. 7 Such revisions were considered at a mid-way stage in the development of the navigational coding but were felt to be prema- ture, and anyway, beyond the options within the budget to in effect, begin again.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 83 Appendix A
Filmography
1986 Image ConText:Two (video)* 1984 The Body on Three Floors (television) 1983 A History of Airports (video) 1982 Image ConText:One (video)* 1981 Vistasound (film)* Friday Fried (film)* 1980 Bristol Bands Newsreel (8mm soundfilm-on-video)* 1976 Sheepman & the Sheared:Parts 1-7 (film)* 1975 Eighteen Months Outside the Grounds of Obscenity and Libel (video installation) 1973 Erota/Afini (book and film)* The Heart Cycle (video)* Porter Pac (video)* 1972 Tender Kisses (film)* wHole (film)* One (film) 1971 Shepherd’s Bush (film)* 1970 Sheet and Unword (films with Ian Breakwell)* 1965 The Lark (graduation film)
*These prints or copy tapes are in current distribution with The Lux Centre (incorporating the London Film-makers Co-operative) and at other centres and collections worldwide - refer to CV in Appendix D.
Much of the ‘original master’ material from this work was lodged in 1987 at the British Film Institute National Film Archive.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 84 Appendix B
Strangers on the Land (Working Title)
Seed Funding Proposal
for an
interactive multimedia CD-ROM prototype
Principle Artist and Producer: MIKE LEGGETT
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 85 “The Australian people are mostly newcomers. They and their land must form a bond .... other- wise we will always remain poor, confused strangers in our own lands.” Tim Flannery The Future Eaters
Strangers on the Land (Working Title) an interactive multimedia CD-ROM prototype exploring aspects of Australian identity
Principle artist and Producer: Mike Leggett
Synopsis Strangers on the Land will be a visually and aurally stimulating experience about the land, its appearance, it’s stories and it’s ownership. Content will be layered beneath a navigational design analogous to a walk through the Australian bush, though the issues it raises may be applicable to land and people anywhere. The interactive process will directly inform the user’s current knowledge and comprehension of concerns around land ownership and utilisation, whether that issue is “certainty” or “land rights”.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 86 Treatment Land is central to Australian culture and history. For indigenous people it is the source of spiritual as well as material nourishment and has been for more than 40,000 years. For all Australians technology and industrialisation have precipitated a crisis in our regard for the land and its capacity to sustain the demands upon which it is called upon to meet.
As a predominently urban culture much of what we experience and under- stand about the land is conveyed and interpreted to us by a whole range of media: cinema, television, painting, photography etc. This mediation process places a frame around the subject, whereby ‘the land’ becomes landscape, an object for distant appreciation.
“Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.” Simon Schama
This production will develop an interface and navigation system, which will enable the user to enjoy as a direct experience a rich visual diffusion of landscape images collected from specific NSW South Coast locations. We consider it essential for the interface design to provide a pleasurable experi- ence whilst providing intuitive access to a range of knowledge. Through a dynamic interactive process, the interface design will encourage the user to explore the many stories, both historical and contemporary, which lie hidden in the landscape. A series of narratives, commentaries and interactions will be encountered which explore the transitions that occur between people and the land, the individual and the landscape - place and memory.
The Interface - a Specification The principle of navigation within this database of objects is centred on gesture - the movement forward to ‘go’ forward; a movement back to stop still; a move backwards to ‘go’ backwards. Sideways movement, left or right, enables viewing left or right, giving access to other controlling options. This basic system of navigation, analogous with a walk through a landscape, will avoid dependence on labelled buttons or “bottom of screen controls”. The walk will progress using hand to Mouse gesture and move from zone to zone. Within each Zone there will be a 360˚ pan containing Nodes as ‘hot spots’ which access short narrative sequences. At the completion of each sequence there will be further options for exploring some Objects. Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 87 Movement through this database of images, captions and sounds will be effected in this prototype by using a Mouse, (though this may progress to joystick or a spatially prepared, movement-sensing system).
Condition One (C1) Movement through the Zones (Mouse ButtonUp)
On-screen cursor rollover zones and function:
Next Zone
View Forward
QT QT 360˚ QT360˚ Freeze Loop: QT Loop: pan Left loop: pan motion QT Right Freeze
View Backwards Previous Zone
The ‘walk through’ the landscape represents movement as a series of image steps moving forward from zone to zone. The analogy is continued with the options of being able to look around to left or right; to look backwards; to return to the previous zone.
The view to left or right will be a 360˚ of the landscape as viewed from one spot through a morphing process. This merges each form and feature of the aspect one to another through a sequence of 12 times 30˚ static shots. The landscape heaves and writhes as the Quicktime movie plays through - see test - it produces extraordinary shapes and unexpected conjunctures of form and colour which are the nodes for gaining access to other levels. At various nodal points in the pan, (some obvious, others revealing themselves), the user may bring the cursor back to the centre of the screen and thus halt the panning action.
Condition Two (C2) Selection of a Node - the Narrative Sequence (Mouse RollOver)
The ‘node’ that is halted in centre screen can now be triggered with a RollOver - there follows a ‘narrative sequence’. This will be a visual se- quence and a sound track lasting from 10 seconds to 60 seconds. The images will be delivered to the screen in several different ways - as a JPEGview slide show, or Quicktime movie or Quicktime VR. Most often though the images will be full-screen PICT images gathered with a digital camera - successive exposures made on a tripod at each location will enable an illusion of move- ment within the landscape to be maintained whilst remaining economical with the computer’s resources.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 88 Foreward to next zone Schematic for accessing QuickTime 3 - 12 image/sound 360˚ Loops Zones 3 - 12 database
Condition 1 (MouseUp) 'Zone' QuickTime 2 360˚ Loop Dunes Zone Condition 2 (MouseRollover) 'Nodes' Pan Pan QuickTime 1 Left 360˚ Loop Beach Zone Right
QuickTime 0 360˚ Loop Sea Zone
Condition 3 Backwards to previous zone (MouseDown) 'Objects'
Condition Three (C3) Selection of an Object (Mouse ButtonDown)
At the end of the ‘narrative sequence’, and before a TimeOut period elapses, it is now possible to access a different set of on-screen cursor rollover options via ButtonDown on the Mouse. These will develop the narrative as a series of Object Tags which will:
• extend the factual or anecdotal evidence by providing reference details, or the full text form of a quotation, for instance;
• linking to other Nodes in other Zones to enable a series of narratives which address the same topic to be followed;
• a Web search function which will be effected in part by pre-pro- grammed boolian queries that will deliver links to other sites where further information can be found about the topic that was the subject of the vignette.
The prototype will demonstrate the potential of each of the options.
The TimeOut returns the user to the Node selected in the C1 Zone. Here a further TimeOut will return the interactive to the Quicktime loop seen at the beginning of that Zone.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 89 “I am before a moving image - it is an image of the sea, the horizon line bisecting the frame of the image, left to right - the surf rolls in, endlessly. ”
The Software Engine The central frame from which one journeys forth creates the introduction to a consistent set of metaphors of navigation which will be controlled dynami- cally by the internal programming language of the authoring package Director. Basically, translating a top down, left right set of motions in the foreground or say the surface, to a landscape digital video file in the next layer below the surface. This will be a Quicktime video file, which has all the attributes of traditional analogue video tape, but with the added bonus of random access, as the file type also supports a time code for location of frames or sequences.
This can be further extended with use of other file formats in relation to the project and would add the ability to track position relative to the file but relational to other linkable 3D movie files.
The objective is to build a smooth easy to use intuitive “front end” which is compartmentalised into generic self contained software modules which can be written and re-edited by the artist to contain the content of the interactive encounters.
Content The options for interaction offer a choice between the experiential, and the combination of the experiential and the didactic. The choices are governed by the gestures made with the Mouse and may respond to questions such as:
What lies behind the beach? What lies in the Bush? What is obscured by what I see? What is to be seen behind what is obscured?
The content will be conveyed through a series of parallel discourses encoun- tered at the various Nodes within each Zone. There are two broad areas of knowledge, (the contemporary and the historical) and a third area which speculates upon the conjunction of the two. Each area will be signalled by colour coded Nodes, it thereby becoming possible to ‘follow’ a discourse thread.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 90 Content Threads
1.Contemporary evidence:
a) ‘Living on the land’ : indigenous and non-indigenous accounts.
b) Popular Imagination and the Culture of Narratives; movies, pub lishing, advertising etc.
2.Historic and other empirical description:
a) Historical from local, national and international archives including: official recorded colonial history, recorded personal history both indigenous and non-indigenous, reported by media both local and national.
b) Geographical: topographical, flora and fauna, farming and mining, industry and commerce, settlement, etc
3. Ideas and Analysis and the Authorial Presence: the function of the chorus or benshai - comment, conjecture, and projection - moving scale outwards from the local and the specific to the global and the general. This will be effected in part by the use of the Web search engine feature to deliver links that will stay current with issues raised by the interactive.
Audience There will be two main modes of address:
• a rapid, experiential encounter with a familiar landscape, poetic to the senses but which is presented in a way that prevents simple absorption: it is vivid but unsettling.
• a more measured pace which, like a pause during a bushwalk or a break from a task, encourages reflective thought on conjective even disputa- tive information: it is didactic but in the active sense, like absorbing a well constructed novel, or examining an archeological site.
The audience will have interests in art, ecology, various histories, media communications, etc. They are most likely to be working in industries such as visual art, multimedia, education, tourism, publishing etc.
Distribution and Exhibition The audience will encounter the work in public spaces and be encouraged to spend longer periods with it in more private and less distracting domains.
As an interactive CD-ROM, this would be publicised and made available for sale through the various target audience outlets, both off-line and on-line. It would also be sent to key national and international festival directors, curators, galleries, museums, universities, government departments of education, tourism, arts etc.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 91 Further Development
Further funding for the project would:
• enable development for more specific use in the art or education setting;
• facilitate a collaboration between the proposer and an indigenous artist or group.
“These histories are about the transformations required in continually remaking constitutive imagination within cultures...... In these histories we hear a whole range of alternative forms and plots which handle time/space differently, experi- ment with identity differently, juggle continuity and discontinuity differently and take as their structures not progress or heroism, but morality, culture, land and Law.” (Healy pp71)
For the publishing and education market for instance, further develop- ment could commence by expanding the depth of references, since clearly the resources available for a prototype limits the number of Nodes and the extent of the Object Tags. Using the prototype, additional support would be sought from publishers, the Board of Studies, Oz on CD, the ABC, university departments, various State and national bodies, (including AME and the Centenary of Federation Fund), to extend the research and produc- tion of further Objects attached to Nodes. The active collaboration of scholars in the field, (Healy, Carter, Goodall et al), would be sought.
The capability of the interactive to take input from the keyboard, either in response to specific requests from the material, or as a connection to the internet, and the ability to print selected material, will also be explored at this further development stage, together with a ‘smart index’ search engine able to work with colour, sound and visual detail descriptors.
For the art and museum market, extra resources would be found to enable the interactive to function in an open space. By developing its visual quality and user interface, ie spatial sensing, and utilising projection and multi channel sound, the immersive and experiential aspects will be amplified. This would require high-end graphics-based computers, data projectors and sound/acoustic spaces linked to sensors. The user will immerse into the sound and image, controlling navigation by moving in a space that would be the equivalent of the Mouse positions - literally, locomotion by side-steps.
Using the prototype, various computer industry companies both here and overseas would be approached, together with arts promotional, university and government departments with resources for developing a high-end, high performance version, (SGI for instance), including Museum of Syd- ney, SOCOG, Centenary of Federation Fund, and other Federal funding initiatives.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 92 To facilitate a collaboration between the proposer and an indigenous artist or group requires complete confidence and equity between partners. This can only happen if the prototype, besides creating its own terms of reference, can demonstrate to the collaborators a modus operandi to reconcile the different cultural perspectives. It is proposed that the prototype will aid this process.
Though the style and language of the final paragraph are dated, (even though it follows the 1967 referendum), it could be regarded as an early statement anticipating cultural reconciliation. It is intended that this project will become part of that process.
“The Dreaming is many things in one. Among them, a kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everthing significant for Aboriginal man. If I am correct in saying so, it is much more complex philosophically than we have so far realised. I greatly hope that artists and men of letters who (it seems increasingly) find inspiration in Aboriginal Australia will use all their gifts of empathy, but avoid banal projection and subjectivism, if they seek to honour the notion.” Stanner
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 93 Bibliographical Research Sources (Funding Proposal)
Carr, Katinka & White, Sheona (Ed) 1997, Pallingjang: exhibition catalogue, Woollongong City Gallery.
Carter, Paul 1996, The Calling to Come, MOS.
Carter, Paul 1996, The Lie of the Land, Faber & Faber.
Carter, Paul 19--, The Road to Botany Bay
Chittock, Lee & Fox, Terry 1997, Travelling with Percy - a South Coast Journey, AIATSIS.
Cook, Capt James 1770, Historical Records of NSW : Facsimile of Charts pub.1980, Lansdowne Slattery & Co.
Egloff, Brian J. 1990, Wreck Bay - an Aboriginal Fishing Community , AIATSIS.
Elsner, John & Cardinal, Roger (ed) 1994, The Cultures of Collecting , Nicholas Thomas, Licensed Curiosity: Cook’s Pacific Voyages , John Forrester, ‘Mille e Tre’: Freud and Collecting, MUP.
Ely, Bonita 1980, Murray/Murindi, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide.
Flannery, Tim 1994, The Future Eaters, Reed Books.
Goodall, Heather 1997, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in NSW 1770- 1972, Allen & Unwin.
Healy, Chris 1997, From the Ruins of Colonialism - History as Social Memory, CUP
Lampert, R 1966, Excavations at North Durras North, NSW Archeology and Physiol- ogy in Oceania Vol 1 (2)
Langton, Marcia 1993, Well I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television, AFC
Organ, Michael 1990, A Documentary History of the Illawara and S. Coast Aborigines 1770-1950 , Wollongong University Press.
Pleaden, R.F. 1990, Coastal Explorers, Milton/Ulladulla & District Historical Society.
Robinson, Roland 1976, The Shift of Sands - an autobiography 1954-62, Macmillan.
Rose, Deborah Bird 1991, Dingo Makes Us Human : Life and Land in an Aboriginal Australian Culture , CUP.
Rose, Deborah Bird 1991, Hidden Histories - Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations, AIATSIS.
Schama, Simon 1995, Landscape & Memory, Fontana.
Stanner, W.E.H. 1979, White Man Got No Dreaming , ANU.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 94 Appendix C
PathScape Pathways through an Australian Landscape
Completion Funding Proposal
for an
interactive multimedia CD-ROM
Principle Artist and Producer: MIKE LEGGETT
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 95 “The Australian people are mostly newcomers. They and their land must form a bond .... otherwise we will always remain poor, confused strangers in our own lands.” Tim Flannery The Future Eaters
PathScape Pathways through an Australian Landscape
An interactive multimedia CD-ROM which explores images and sounds from a part of the coastal plain of SE Australia, the location of belief and identity for both the indigenous and non-indigenous people who live there. Through a dynamic and interactive process of presenta- tion, intersections are made with interpretations and mediations about The Land, its many appearances, its many histories.
Principle artist and Producer: Mike Leggett
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 96 Treatment Land is central to Australian culture and history. For indigenous people it is the source of spiritual as well as material nourishment and has been for more than 40,000 years. As a predominently urban culture much of what Australians experience and understand about the land is conveyed and interpreted to us by a whole range of media: cinema, television, painting, photography etc. This mediation process places a frame around the subject, whereby ‘the land’ becomes landscape, an object for distant appreciation.
“Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.” Simon Schama
For all Australians technology and industrialisation have precipitated a crisis in our regard for the land and its capacity to sustain the demands upon which it is called upon to meet.
Interface: the Audience The audience will have interests in art, ecology, history, social relations, media study, communications theory, etc. They are most likely to be working in industries such as visual art, multimedia, education, tourism, govern- ment, publishing etc.
The interface design approach is demonstrated in the prototype and based upon two principles:
- a rapid, experiential encounter with a familiar landscape, poetic to the senses but which is presented in a way that prevents simple absorption: it is vivid but unsettling.
- a more measured pace which, like a pause during a bushwalk or a break from a task, encourages reflective thought on conjective, even disputa- tive, information: it is didactic but in the active sense, like absorbing a well constructed novel, or examining an archeological site.
The various levels which the user can explore can be summarised with the following diagram:
ROLLOVER Interaction for EXPERIENTIAL pleasure
East-West Zones track
360˚ Morph Pan OR Margin Node
BUTTONDOWN Interaction for KNOWLEDGE acquisition
Nodes (Narratives )
Objects (Corolleries)
Indexes and Thematic Pathways
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 97 Interaction The prototype has been developed with an interface and navigation system which will enables the user to enjoy as a direct experience a rich visual diffusion of landscape images collected from specific NSW South Coast locations. We consider it essential for the interface design to provide a pleasurable experience and then as an option, provide intuitive access to a range of knowledge. The learning of shortcuts and their skillful use could become a feature of the fully developed version. Game play with the ele- ments of stories may also become part of the experience. The many stories, both historical and contemporary, which lie hidden in the landscape, compel the user the piece together the real picture that is often at variance with the image of a landscape, often regarded as simply the backdrop to events. The series of narratives, commentaries and interactions which are encountered explore the transitions that occur between people and the land, the indi- vidual and the landscape, place and memory.
Interface Design - Variations from Prototype The principle of navigation in the prototype is centred on gesture - the movement forward with the mouse to ‘go’ forward; a movement back to stop still; a movement backwards to ‘go’ backwards. Sideways movement, left or right, enables viewing left or right with a 360˚ panning action within which access to narratives is indicated. Moving to the diagonal corners will provide conditional access to narrative options.
Condition One (C1) Movement through the Zones (RollOvers)
A variation to the prototype on-screen cursor rollover areas and their func- tions will appear as such:
This basic system of navigation, analogous with a walk through a landscape, moves from one landscape zone to the next and avoids dependence on labelled buttons or “bottom of screen controls”. Each Zone represents
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 98 distinctive natural phenomena. At variation from the prototype: i) direction of movement, to the ranges (west) or to the ocean (east) will be indicated either with a graphic device to top or bottom of screen; or a larger cursor arrow, or with colour: red towards the west, yellow towards the east. Or a combination of larger arrow and colour.
ii) access to narrative content will be signalled as part of the ‘tracking’ or ‘perambulation’ process from the ocean to the ranges. The space around the central screen will be utilised to display an image/or colour which signal the type or ‘the thread’ of the available narrative (Node). These partially seen images will correspond with specific points on the path, appearing and disappearing as the user moves along it. By moving the cursor back to centre screen and halting movement the image around the central frame can then be accessed by a rollover to one of the diagonal corners. This will reveal the whole image and possibly launch some sound which in turn indicates the subject of a narrative which can then be accessed in full with a buttondown.
iii) whereas in the prototype there is a timeout period of 5-10 seconds that, without mouse movement, returns the user through the levels eventu- ally to the screensaver, a fresh strategy will be adopted that enables active control of movement through the levels. This will most likely involve condi- tional parameters which enable departure from the 360˚ pan or an image sound narrative by moving the mouse to the top or bottom of the screen, ie through a re-set of the hotspots in the movie pan.
Condition Two (C2) Selection of a Node - the Narrative Sequence (ButtonDown)
By clicking of the Margin Node, or, as in the prototype by selecting a Node in the Morph Pan, a narrative together with image sequence will launch, or through use of the mouse by the user, exploration of a single image whilst listening to the story.
To next zone Schematic for (West) accessing QuickTime 3 - 12 image/sound 360˚ Loops Zones 3 - 12 database
Condition 1 'Zone'
QuickTime 2 360˚ Loop Dunes Zone Condition 2 'Nodes' Pan to Pan to South QuickTime 1 North 360˚ Loop Beach Zone
QuickTime 0 360˚ Loop Sea Zone
Condition 3 To next zone 'Objects' (East)
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 99 Each narrative will usually be restricted in length to 30 seconds maximum. Users will thus be motivated, if they wish to hear more of a longer story, to continue in the subsequent or neighbouring part of the path, or the morph pan, for its continuation. Searching along the path through the Bush for the continuation point of a story will at first be a fragmented experience for the user but as the path is learnt, gradually experience, and visual and sound memory, will help re-assemble the complete story. Each Morph Pan will give access to stories related to ‘a single issue’ and the interelated stories they contain - such as: the logging industry; the effect of tourism on local ecologies; etc.
Condition Three (C3) Selection of an Object (ButtonDown)
At the end of the ‘narrative sequence’, and before a TimeOut period elapses, it is now possible to access a different set of on-screen options via ButtonDown on the Mouse. These will develop the narrative as a series of Object or corolleries from the initial story, which will:
- extend the factual or anecdotal evidence by providing reference details, or the full text form of a quotation, for instance; an Index to all the content would be accessed from here. This could utilise several on-screen devices - an indigenous totem, or a non-indigenous symbol - enabling linking to other Nodes in other Zones creating immediate access to a series of narratives which address the related topics to be followed by the user;
- as a part of the Index option, a Web search function will be enabled in part by pre-programmed boolian queries which will deliver links to other sites where further information can be found about the topics of a Node or Object narrative.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 100 In addition, a greater depth of programming will: • better manage the opening / navigation of many narrative sequences in many folders. This would allow smoothing of transitions between levels, both upwards and downwards, and be achieved with the possible use of a new metaphor.
• improve bugs and speed problems and the enhancement of CD-ROM playback will be reworked to give the interface a much more responsive feel. This will include extensive beta testing as well as CD optimisation prior to Quality Assurance to software/ computer industry standards.
Further options: • A Compass/Sun like device that sits on screen and rotates indicates some sense of location to the user, could be an optional item that is turned on when required.
TimeOut periods will return the user to prior levels until the screensaver image of surf on the beach is reached. The screensaver will display indi- vidual words or phrases extracted from the narratives which will, like the Index, be linked directly to a content database.
“I am before a moving image - it is an image of the sea, the horizon line bisecting the frame of the image, top to bottom - the surf rolls in, endlessly. ”
Content The options for interaction offer a choice between the experiential, and the combination of the experiential and the knowedge-based. The choices are governed by the gestures made with the Mouse and may respond to ques- tions such as:
What lies behind the beach? What lies in the Bush? What is obscured by what I see? What is to be seen behind what is obscured?
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 101 Motivation for the short-term encounter or sustained involvement over the long-term will rely on a compelling interactive process which leads the user through a series of pleasurable and remarkable encounters with sound and image, offering as an option to the user, an engagment with areas of knowl- edge designed to intrigue and inform, linked together by this landscape.
The content will be conveyed through a series of discourses encountered at the various Nodes within each Zone. The two broad areas of knowledge arising from human interaction with the material circumstances of this country, the contemporary and the historical, part fact and part belief related to this landscape, will form the researched substance of this fully developed version.
Zones The number of Zones traversed will expand from the six in the prototype to twelve in the full version:
0 Sea and Headlands Not in prototype 1 Beach In prototype 2 Creek “ 3 Dunes “ 4 Light Bush “ 5 Wetlands “ 6 Rainforest “ 7 Highway Not in prototype 8 Rainforest Gulleys “ 9 River Flood Plain “ 10 Ranges Slopes “ 11 Ranges Peaks “
These Zones form the skeletal structure for exploring the landscape, its appearnaces and its stories. Each area of discourse will be signalled by colour-coded or image Nodes visible within each Zone, it thereby becoming possible to ‘follow’ a particular discourse or thread.
Content Threads Summary 1. Contemporary evidence: a) ‘Living on the land’ : indigenous and non-indigenous accounts. b) representations through Popular Culture; movies, publishing, advertising etc.
2. Historic and other empirical description: a) Historical from local, national and international archives including: offi- cial recorded colonial history, recorded personal history both indigenous and non-indigenous, reported by media both local and national. b) Geographical: topographical, flora and fauna, farming and mining, industry and commerce, settlement, etc
3. Ideas and Analysis and the Authorial Presence: the function of the chorus or benshai - comment, conjecture, and projection - moving scale outwards from the local and the specific to the global and the general. This will be effected in part by the use of the Web search engine feature to deliver links that will stay current with issues raised by the interactive.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 102 Content - Development from Prototype A full version of this interactive will incorporate changes to the navigational structure already outlined on page 5. Other developments from the proto- type, listed below, also have implications for the density of content related material.
Indigenous People A meeting with the Ulladulla Land Council and the Budamurra Aboriginal Corporation in Ulladulla at which the prototype was demonstrated has led to the Land Council expressing a desire to contribute stories to a full version. A non-exclusive licence to include these stories would be purchased. In addition, we are currently researching ways in which Budamurra could become the producers of the narrative sequences through a related custom- ised training program auspiced by Metro Screen. Should Budamurra not be in a position to produce all sound and image material then the project producers will provide copies of material collected during Budamurra sequences, and the final production, to the community and also to the archive of the AIATSIS library. The aim of the project is to retain and develop the methods of consultation and collaboration with the Budamurra Aboriginal Corporation that has existed amongst the crew and copyright holders during the making of the prototype. This will preserve the integrity of stories licensed to the produc- tion, and their context, within the structure of the overall work.
Production Programming Adjustments and improvements to the script programming in the prototype will enhance production techniques for scripting each narrative sequence in the full version. The implementation of an automated procedure to batch convert a series of image files and a sound file into a linear ‘slide show’, will allow more time to be devoted to optimising navigation features, and the preparation of a range of stories in Quicktime format. These will provide timings for each image which are then entered into a plain text document which, in effect become coded interpretations of the QT movies. These, when pasted into Director, then call the original picture and sound resources, (more economically stored assets than QT movies), to create the picture and sound narrative ‘on the fly’.
Sound A stereo track will be introduced to the sound design, running in conjunc- tion with parallel mono tracks and ‘spot’ effects to provide a richer sound presence tied closely to zone character and ecology - volume level could also become relational to location within a Zone. Budamurra and Bruno Koenig the sound designer have both indicated a desire to collaborate closely in this respect. Stereo sound design will also considerably enhance the sense of place during the morphed pans, for instance. In close collaboration with the interface programmer, sounds to indicate sequence transitions and to confirm option-taking, together with the creation of silent spaces will extend the dynamic operation of sound throughout experiencing the process of interaction.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 103 Spoken Text A greater variety of voices would read the prepared texts than was possible in the prototype, in order to create both a greater level of surface and expres- sion and the ability to use the first person form of address. In describing the natural world, ie a geological setting, or relating the events of the past, ie the development of the timber industry, these will be communicated through the use of the narrative form rather than that of the lecture. Each of these stories or groups of related stories will be directly accessible through the index/content section under short titles - The Geologist’s Story, The Timber Worker’s, The Sawyer’s Story etc.
Resource, Index and Search Capabilities Sources of cultural material will be referenced as an option from the end of each narrative sequence and as a searchable index. The design of the index could include thematic pathways suggested by icons, images, as well as words. In order to maximise the ‘resource potential’ of the completed project one of two indexing systems will be selected: • Indexing System (lite) - at the end of every narrative movie a ‘Source/ Index’ icon will enable the user to view a text document containing source and possibly technical data (the kind stored with each QT 4.0 movie). A few keywords associated with each narrative sequence could also be searched from this option location, to enable the launching of narratives with the same keyword. • Indexing System (full) - similar to the indexing of above but with more comprehensive features, such as cross references to other narrative keywords held in a searchable database enabling users to research particular themes via a three-framed indexing structure. • A snake like optional item on screen could display a topography of the track, and the location of the user as an icon could be indicated. This could also be used like a scroll bar.
To extend the use of the interactive as a learning resource, options for other kinds of input from the keyboard will enable: • through connection to the internet, pre-scripted complex searches of the Web to be undertaken with an improved dialogue box interface; • the ability to print selected material from the index database.
Content Research and Copyright Further development will commence by expanding the depth of references made in the prototype and through fresh research into the Zones that will be new to the full development version. Besides the authoring of fresh material, this will be pursued through libraries, archives and the Budamurra Aborigi- nal Corporation in Ulladulla. The active collaboration of scholars in the field, (Healy, Carter, Goodall et al), will also be sought. A database of the ‘content assets’ will be established to enable efficient selection of material as well as the tracking of potential rights payments to, and permissions from, copyright holders. It is envisaged that much of the historical material will be outside copyright. Kathryn Wells, the researcher, will also liase and develop with Budamurra, cultural protocols and a contract for the production or joint-production of suitable material based on the non-exclusive rights to stories. The project will respect Budamurra’s desire for overall product integrity and benefit, including in the process of production, the contribution of multimedia production knowledge and skills by crew members to Budamurra commu- nity members.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 104 Technical Research Further research will seek extra resources would be found to enable the interactive to function in a large open space or gallery, for the art and mu- seum market. By developing its visual quality and user interface, ie spatial sensing, and utilising projection and multi channel sound, the immersive and experiential aspects will be amplified. The purpose of this research will seek simply to enable, rather than prevent, the migration of programming and content to high-end platforms.
Marketing, Distribution and Exhibition The audience will encounter the work in public spaces and be encouraged to spend longer periods with it in more private and less distracting domains through the purchase of a CD-ROM. This would be publicised and made available for sale through the various target audience outlets, both off-line and on-line. The interactive will be promoted and marketed as both an installation and as a CD-ROM take home to key national and international festival directors, curators, galleries, museums, universities, government departments of education, tourism, arts etc.
Research Resources and Bibliography Refer to Strangers on the Land seed funding proposal.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 105 Appendix D
CURRICULUM VITAE June 1999
Research and Exhibition 1999 - Recipient, curatorial research travel grant, New Media Fund, Australia Council. Itinerary including - Invencao Sao Paulo (ISEA99) to present, ‘Media Art, Au- tonomy and Country’, joint paper with Ellen Pau (Hong Kong); Ars Electronica, Linz; Kiasma, Helsinki; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Smithsonian, Washington DC; ZKM, Karlsruhe and others in Philidelphia, New York City, London, Berlin and Amsterdam. - Research, development and curation of Digital Hybrids for the Museum of Con- temporary Art, Sydney on the work of Natalie Jeremijenko and Perry Hoberman - exhibition postponed to 2000. - Paper on curatorial research tour to NxT Symposium, Darwin. - Panel member for Bug, multimedia exhibition at Melbourne Film Festival. - Principal artist and producer, funding development proposal to Australian Film Commission for ‘PathScape - pathways through an Australian Landscape’. - Recipient, travel grant from NSW Film & Television Office.
1998 - Australia Council On-Line Forum; “Do We Produce too Many Arts Graduates”; consultant, moderator and evaluator. - Principal artist and producer, seed funding proposal to Australian Film Commission for ‘Strangers on the Land (SonteL)’. - Recipient, travel grant from NSW Film & Television Office.
1997 - Videotage International Video Art Festival, Hong Kong: ‘Microwave’ exhibition of contemporary artists’ CD-ROM. -BURNING the INTERFACE
1996 -BURNING the INTERFACE
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 106 1995 -ISEA95, Montreal: paper ‘CD-ROM - the 21st Century Bronze?, made possible with a research grant from the Industry and Cultural Development Branch of the AFC, which included visits to centres in Canada, England and Ireland. -ELECTRONIC MEDIA ART DIRECTORY: International Distribution and Exhibi- tion. Researcher and Editor for the Marketing Branch of the Australian Film Com- mission. -‘Intersections95’ art and technology conference, UNSW: paper ‘Burning the Interface - Artists’ CD-ROM’.
1994 -‘DIGITAL MEDIA and the VISUAL ARTS’: discussion paper for National Associa- tion for the Visual Arts. Film print sold to National Library of Australia -ARTISTS’ CD-ROM: grant from Film Development Branch of the Australian Film Commission to research exhibition proposal for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. -‘Intersections94’ art and technology Conference, UNSW: paper ‘CD-ROM - the 21st Century Greek Bronze?’
1993 -BEAGLE BAY: series of digital photo and Quicktime pieces based on NSW South Coast location.
1992 -LOCUS: distributable computer/interactive study of the dynamics and context of the interface between machine and viewer.
1990 -PREDICTION PIECE #10: video and computer image component development for Lyndal Jones’s performance.
1989 -PARADOX relational database: research and production of various databases for Community Services Victoria,Inner Urban Region.
1988 -FACEWORK : treatment on the human face andthe people who make it their livelihood. -TALES GATES : installation, MIMA Experimenta; Gertrude Street Gallery, Mel- bourne.
1987 -THE DIARIES OF A WELSH SWAGMAN :treatment for Teliesyn. -24 HOURS : 8mm film-on-tape installation; Watershed Gallery, Bristol.
1986 -COLWAY THEATRE TELEVISION PROJECT : outline script for Teliesyn, shortlisted by Channel Four Television arts. CONJUNCTIONS : outline script for Bristol Film Workshop, shortlisted by ACGB. -PLANK POINTS and TALE OF A GATE : photo-constructions in South West Arts exhibition, Watershed Gallery, Bristol.
1985 -READINGS FROM.... : treatment and pilot tape, for Bristol Film Workshop. -SPORTING CHANCE : treatment and pilot tape with Bristol Film Workshop.
1984 -THE BODY POLITIC : treatment and pilot for Bristol Film Workshop. -JUNGLE : treatment and pilot tape with Playwrights Company for Bristol Film Workshop. -NEW DANCE AND LIVE MUSICIANS : treatment and rehearsals with Dance Centre for Bristol Film Workshop.
1983 -THE OTHER SIDE: EUROPEAN AVANT-GARDE CINEMA 1960-1980 : USA film tour exhibition.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 107 1982 -JETHRO TULL : TEA : SOLO : IMAGE ConTEXT:THREE : four treatments for Bristol Film Workshop and Channel Four Television.
1980 -BRUNEL’S DREAM : collaboration with Bristol University Drama Department on the conception, design and installation of projection devices for a production by John Downie. -BBC OMNIBUS : collaboration with arts programme about the ‘first casualty of broadcasting’.
1980 Film Print sales : to British Council for tour of USA; to National Library of Australia in Canberra; to Paris and New York Film Co-ops.
1977-9 -IMAGE ConTEXT : lecture/performance to accompany film presentations. -BEAUTY & THE BEAST : collage exhibited at Camden Arts Centre surrealist show.
Film Print sales : to Arts Council for tour in Europe and Australia, Perspectives on Avante-Garde Film; to South West Arts; to ACGB for the Hayward Gallery exhibi- tion, FILM AS FILM.
1976 -SHEEPMAN & THE SHEARED : a film commenced in 1969, examining the conjunction of film and a rural landscape.In seven parts, total duration of 30-minutes -ARTISTS’ BOOKS : ACGB touring exhibition.
Film Print sales : to BBC TV Open University 20th Century Art series.
1969-75 -OUTSIDE THE GROUNDS OF OBSENITY AND LIBEL AND INSIDE THE GROUNDS OF HYDE PARK : video installation Serpentine Gallery, London. -NOTES FROM A YEAR-ROUND MOVIE and NOTES FROM A VISIT TO THE JAN VAN EYCK AKADEMIE : silk-screen prints for The Recollection, SW Arts touring exhibition. -EROTA/AFINI : a two-way narrative, in film form, (30-minutes),and book form; published by Beau Geste Press, Devon. -INTERVIEW : an auto-interview, for AustrianTelevision, 1-minute. -PORTER PAC and THE HEART CYCLE : two 15-minute videotapes exploring the potential of portable industrial video equipment. -TENDER KISSES : film examines the television image within a domestic environ- ment : 20-minutes. -’wHOLE’ : an archeological dig in progress: a 5-minute film. -ONE : an exhibition/event by visual artist Ian Breakwell in the Angela Flowers - Gallery, London :20-minute film. SHEPHERD’S BUSH : a fragment of film expands the confines of the cinema : 15- minutes. -APG (Artists Placement Group) exhibition, Hayward Gallery, London : design and operation of video facility. -SHEET : with Ian Breakwell, a bedsheet is encountered in a variety of locations and events : 25-minutes . -UNWORD : an event/performance by Ian Breakwell in which the camera as performer produces a film: 50-minutes
Production Award, Visual Arts panel, South West Arts; Prizewinner, South West Arts/ Westward TV Open Art Competition; Production assistance Award, Film&Video panel, Arts Council of Great Britain.
Film Print sales: to Belgian Film Archive, to Belgian BRT television channel.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 108 SCREENINGS at exhibitions, cinemateques, festivals, colleges, universities and conferences throughout Europe, Australia and the Americas including; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; ACME Gallery, London; Tyneside Cinema,Newcastle- on-Tyne; Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol; Beauborg, George Pompidou Centre, Paris; Edinburgh Festival; Espace d’echanges d’Art Contemporain, Lyon; Chapelle des Penitents Blancs, Avignon; Kommunales Kino, Hanover; Kino Mansfield, Derby- shire; Frankfurt Book Fair, Germany; Third Eye Centre, Glasgow; Derby Lonsdale Independent Film Awards, Derbyshire; the Parachute Center, Calgary; Pacific Cinemateque, Vancouver; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Cal; Canyon Co-op, San Francisco; Rocky Mountain Film Centre, Boulder, Colorado; Theatre Vanguard, Los Angeles; Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Millenium Film Workshop, New York City; Center for Media Study at SUNY, Buffalo, New York State; SCREENINGS cont: Musee des Beaux Arts, Montreal; Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC), Toronto; Bristol City Art Gallery; Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall; St George Project, Liverpool; The Basement, Newcastle-on-Tyne; Stejdlicht Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Modern Art,Oxford; Milan Biennale, Italy; National Film Theatre, London; X-Screen, Cologne; Walker Gallery, Liver- pool; Pesaro Festival of New Film,Italy; ART Spectrum exhibition Alexander Palace, London; CAYC Gallery, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Bibliography 1999 Australian Multimedia Catalogue, AFC; RealTime /32 ‘SonteL’ in liftout ‘Working the Screen; Vertigo Vol1 No9, ‘Margaret Tait Remembered’ by David Curtis.
1998
1997 World Art, ‘Burning the Interface’
1996 Real Time /13, ‘At the Real and Space of Interface’Keith Galeish Artlink V16 No2&3, ‘Landmark Exhibition’ Lyn Tune Photofile No 40, ‘Making Strange’ Darren Tofts ‘Squatting the Media’ Linda Wallace Art+Text No 54, Burning the Interface review. Time magazine June 3, ‘Spirit in the Machines’ Click! on-line mag May, ‘Words for the Cities’ Real Time /11 ‘Critically Interactive’ John Conomos
Other reviews and previews for Burning the Interface in: The Good Weekend; Sydney Star Observer; Sydney Morning Herald; Sunday Telegraph; The Australian; Daily Telegraph; Capital Q-Xtra; The Age; AFC News; Australian MacUser; She; ArchiData News; Blitz; City; Elle; Beat; On the Street; 3D World; The Canberra Times; Australian Printer magazine; Smarts; PC Week; Sun Herald; Weekly Computer Report; Artlines.
Diverse Practices: a Critical Reader on British Video Art pp355
1988 Experimenta 1988, Melbourne; catalogue. 1986 Charting Time : Serpentine Gallery, London: ACGB touring exhibition catalogue. 1985 Film & Video Artists on Tour. 1984 South West Survey : exhibition catalogue Regional Film & Video Directory.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 109 1983 “The Other Side - European Avant-Grade Cinema 1960-1980”: USA film tour catalogue. 1980 Screen Volume 20 No. 3/4: “Film-Related Practice and the Avant-Garde.” 1979 Film as Film : Hayward exhibition catalogue.
Post Production 1993 PREDICTION PIECES: compilation tape of all the Pieces #1-10 for retrospective exhibition installation. 60-minutes for Lyndal Jones.
1989 SHADOW OF THE CHIMNEY: the residents of the Western suburbs in conflict with industrial polluters. 48-minutes by Still Moving Pictures for Film Victoria, off- lined from BVU. FIRST TIME TRAGEDY, SECOND TIME FARCE: the Bicentennary and colonial history. 60-minutes by Counter Productions for Film Victoria; as co-editor, on film.
1988 TROUBLING THE TYRANTS: 40th anniversary of the signing of the UN Declara- tion of Human Rights. Promo by Open Channel for Museum of Victoria, off-lined from BVU. MELBOURNE DIG: chronicling the largest archeological excavation undertaken in the City. 40-minutes by Warner/Hughes for Film Victoria, on film.
1987 BEFORE THE LAW :police training,bail, sentencing and social work reveal British Law at work. 4 X 30 minute documentaries by Forum Television for Channel Four TV, off-lined from Betacam. WHAT’S NEXT? :youth unemployment,training and recreation in the year of the British General Election. 25-minute promo by Forum Television for the Educational and Social Research Council, off-lined from Betacam. IOLO MORGANWYG-the Bard of Liberty : dramatised documentary about the 17th Century Welsh poet and nationalist, the inventor of “the Welsh tradition”. 50-minute English and Welsh language versions by Teliesyn for S4C and BBC Wales, on film.
1986 DANGEROUS CHARACTERS :the Italian ethnic community in Britain, 1920 to 1945, the rise of Mussolini’s Fascism and the British Governments extra-ordinary responses. Two 50-minute programmes,(sub-titled),by Imageworth for Channel Four Television, on film. THE AFRICAN FROM ABERYSTWYTH : Professor Gwyn Williams on David Ifon Jones, the Welsh socialist, his deep involvement in South African politics and who, in 1921 in Moscow, became the Comintern representative for the whole of Africa. 50-minute English and Welsh language versions by Teliesyn for S4C and the BBC, on film and tape.
1985 AN ISLAND BUILT ON COAL :using archive and contemporary interviews with the protagonists, a history of the British coal industry since nationalisation in 1946. 40-minute programme by Trade Films for Channel Four Television, on film and tape. LEST WHO FORGETS? : Gwyn Williams in the Soviet Union for May Day 1985 and the 30th anniversary celebrations for the end of World War Two. 50-minute English and Welsh language versions by Teliesyn for S4C and the BBC, on film.
1984 CREFFTAU : a group of Welsh craftespeople working in glass, wool, stone and on paper describe their lives. Three 30-minute Welsh language versions by Wyvern TV for S4C, off-line from film.
Also, regularily working for HTV and the BBC, cutting news, sport, current affairs and documentary.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 110 Recent Production 1999 Strangers on the Land (SonteL): principal artist and producer of CD-ROM prototype with Brad Miller, Adam Hinshaw, Alex Davies, Kathryn Wells and Bruno Koenig.
1988 CIRIA Quality Systems: produced and directed second unit shoot in Melbourne for promo by Michael Barrett Productions.
1986 IMAGE ConTEXT:TWO : a sequel to Image ConText:One, from the point of view of the consumer. 60-minutes on video for Bristol Film Workshop.
1985 THE BODY ON THREE FLOORS : a collaboration between a zoologist, a dancer, a jazz musician, a clown, a writer, an art historian and the film-maker to produce an experimental programme for television about our attitudes to play and creativeness. 50-minutes on film and videotape for South West Arts and TSW-Television South West. Screened at the 1987 Melbourne Film Festival.
1984 A HISTORY OF AIRPORTS : the nature of modern flight and its antecedents freely explored with writer, John Downie. 50-minutes on videotape, funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation.
1983 IMAGE ConTEXT:ONE :a description, framed through an historical analogy, of the material and organisational factors affecting the producer of film and video working at the fringes of the commercial film and television Industry. 50-minutes on video for Bristol Film Workshop education programme.
1981 VISTASOUND :an experimental film exploring the relationship of sound-to-image utilising an identical soundtrack against three very different picture versions. 45- minutes on film for Bristol Film Workshop,part funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain. FRIDAY FRIED : four spoken narratives on sound inter-relate with four locations on picture. 15-minutes on film for Bristol Film Workshop.
Also, during this period, scripts, treatments and pilots through Bristol Film Work- shop for Channel Four Television, Arts Council of Great Britain and the British Film Institute.
Education and Training 1993-99 University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts; Master of Fine Art degree by research. Topic: Interactive Multimedia 1989-91 CSV Management Level One 5-day course; short courses in PC Support, Lotus and Paradox. 1968-71 Assistant film editor with BBC Television for Panorama, Softly Softly, Tomorrows World; serials, drama, light entertainment and comedy. 1966-68 General assistant with Rolls Royce Aero Engines Film Unit,Bristol. 1962-65 Regent Street Polytechnic, (now University of Westminster); Diploma in Photogra- phy with cinematography. (Selected for National Film Theatre annual graduate film screenings 1966). L.I.I.P. (Licentiate Institute of Incorporated Photographers). 1961-62 Croydon College of Art foundation studies.’A’level Art. 1957-61 Ottershaw School; 8 ‘O’ level GCEs.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 111 Teaching 1971-85 Exeter College of Art and Design, (now University of Plymouth); part-time Senior Lecturer in film,video and photography. 1977-78 Newcastle-on-Tyne Polytechnic Faculty of Fine Art; part-time Lecturer II in film and video. 1971-72 Somerset College of Art; Lecturer I, Foundation Studies.
Also,visiting lecturer and external assessor to Colleges of Art, Universities and Polytechnics throughout Britain, Europe, Australia and the USA,including; University of Western Sydney, Nepean; Canberra School of Art; Slade School, University College, London; Royal College of Art, London; University of Reading, Berkshire; Newcastle-on-Tyne Polytechnic; Newport College of Art, Gwent; Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, Holland; Alberta College of Art, Calgary, Canada; University of British Columbia, Vancouver; San Francisco State University,California. University of Kansas, Lawrence; State University of New York, Binghampton; Queens University, Ontario; Falmouth College of Art, Corn- wall; St. Martin’s College of Art, London; Phillip Institute of Technology, Bundorra, Melbourne; Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne; Alexander Mackie CAE, Sydney; Sydney College of the Arts; State College, Melbourne; University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma; University of Western Sydney Nepean; Key Centre for Cultural Policy Research, Griffith University.
Previous Positions and Employers 1992-99 Multimedia Consultant & Database Administrator, National Association for the Visual Arts.
1989-92 Information Systems Manager (ADM5), Community Services Victoria, Inner Urban Region.
1979-89 Producer/Director and Editor, self-employed freelance, Film and Television indus- tries.
1971-85 Senior Lecturer/Lecturer II, part-time; Exeter College of Art, Devon, England. Film, Video and Photography artist/film-maker.
1968-71 Assistant Film editor, BBC Television.
1966-68 General Assistant, Rolls-Royce Aero Engines Film Unit.
Community 1996-99 Board member, dLux Media Arts (Sydney Intermedia Network). 1997 Acting President, Sydney Intermedia Network. 1986-87 Chair, Association of Cinema and Television Technicians (ACTT), Western Regional Group and Western Freelance Shop. 1985-87 Member, Council of Management, Bristol Community Dance Centre. 1979-82 Committee member, ACTT Western Freelance Shop and National Committee for Francised Workshops. Director Treasurer, Bristol Film Workshop. 1979-80 Chair, South West Arts Film Advisory Panel. 1976-77 Co-ordinator, South West Independent Film-makers Tour. 1975-82 Founder Member, Independent Film-makers Association. 1972-73 Organiser, Exe Gallery exhibition programme. 1968-96 Founder member, London Film-makers Co-operative
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 112 Bibliography
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Critical Issues in Electronic Media, 1995, ed Simon Penny, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY.
Curtis, David 1971, Experimental Film - a fifty year evolution, Studio Vista, London.
Directory of Electronic Arts 1995-96, CHAOS - see under Guide International des Arts Electronique.
Dixon, Rachel 1997, Other Spaces - the marketing, distribution and exhibition of interactive art, Australian Film Commission, Sydney.
Electronic Arts in Australia,1994, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg, Continuum V8 No1, The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 113 Gauguet, Bertrand 1998, Towards a New Economy of the Digital Work of Art?
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Guide International des Arts Electronique 1995-96, CHAOS Editions, Paris, and John Libbey, London.
Harvey, Sylvia 1978, May’68 and Film Culture, British Film Institute, Lon- don.
Kerckhove, Derrick de 1995, The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality, Somerville House Publishing, Toronto, Canada.
Leggett, Mike & Michael, Linda 1996, Burning the Interface
Legrice, Malcolm 1997, Abstract Film and Beyond, Studio Vista, London.
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Lesy, Michael 1976, Real Life, Pantheon Books, NYC.
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Miles, Adrian 1996, The Emporer’s New Clothes, Media International Aus- tralia No 81, AFTRS, Sydney.
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Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 114 South West Film Directory 1980, ed. Rod Stoneman, South West Arts, Exeter, Devon, England.
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Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 115 Published Articles and Papers by Mike Leggett
1999 Electronic Space and Public Space: museums, galleries and digital media, Continuum V13 No2 July 1999, ed Darren Tofts, The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia.
ISEA98 CD-ROM review, Leonardo Digital Reviews, MIT, Mass.
1998 A Digital Crisis, Byeline (Craft South), Adelaide.
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Cultural Windows , RealTime/24, Sydney.
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1997 Respect and Indigenous Interconnectivity on the Fulbright Symposium, RealTime/21, Sydney.
Cyber Cultures & Techne exhibition review, RealTime articles/18, Sydney.
Artists’ Burning Art : Contemporary International CD-ROMs, essay in catalogue of the Microwave Festival ‘97, Videotage, Hong Kong.
Planet of Noise CD-ROM review, Photofile No.52, Australian Centre for Pho- tography, Sydney.
Shock in the Ear: Norie Neumark, MESH #11, experimenta, Melbourne.
Under a Federal Sun?, RealTime/20, Sydney.
Microwave catalogue essay, Videotage International Video Festival, Hong Kong.
ISEA96, ANAT Newsletter, Adelaide.
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1996 Digital Media and Public Spaces, Panel Session paper, Proceedings of the International Symposium of Electronic Art (Rotterdam), ISEA, Holland.
Burning the Interface
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 116 Burning the Interface, Artlines 1/4, Art Law Centre of Australia, Sydney.
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Phobias, Fashion and Hope, /13 RealTime, Sydney.
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CD-ROM - the 21st Century Bronze? Burning the Interface
Margaret Tait, in A Directory of British Film & Video Artists, ed David Curtis, Arts Council of England, London.
1995 CD-ROM - the 21st Century Bronze?, Proceedings of the International Sympo- sium of Electronic Art (Montreal), ISEA, Holland.
CD-ROM Art, RealTime, Sydney.
Waxweb - photo-images Buzzing on the Wires, Photofile No.45, ACP, Sydney. Electronic Media Art - an international guide for exhibition and distribution (editor), Australian Film Commission, Sydney.
Storm, columnist, May, June, July, August, September issues, Melbourne.
1994 Interactive - a Seminar, Art Master number 3, College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Interactive - a Conference, Artmaster issue number 4, COFA UNSW, Sydney.
Interactive - a Presentation, Artmaster issue number 5. COFA UNSW, Sydney.
1992 Found Sounds, in Essays in Sound, eds Davies, Jonson, Jokovich, Contempo- rary Sound Arts, Sydney.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 117 Illustrations
1A. Image ConText: One (1979/1983): videotape, 50mins, from the introduction section : Mike Leggett.
1B. Image ConText: One (1979/1983): videotape, 50mins, from the final section : Mike Leggett.
2. Abstract Film and Beyond, Malcolm Legrice, 1997. (Dust jacket) The images on the front cover are from the John Whitney film 1-2-3 (1970), described by Legrice as: ‘the clearest and most satisfactory work in this field (programmed artistic form) to date, the most appro- priate to the computer process being the simplest: an unedited, black and white, time ‘sculpture’...”
3. Cyberflesh Girlmonster (1995): image from interactive multimedia CD- ROM : Linda Dement.
4. A Digital Rhizome (1994): image from jewel-case cover : Brad Miller.
5. Discobulus : 4th Century Greek bronze figure. “To anticipate the social impact on the present of electronically com- pressing time and space, is a problem - on the future, daunting. Could Guttenberg have anticipated the impact of formalising the written word using wooden blocks? Could Daguerre or Fox Talbot have predicted the social effect of organising silver salts onto metal and paper? Would Logie Baird, (the inventor of television), have given-up if he had seen a promo for Australia’s Funniest Video Show? To extend the time frame further - what would Myron, the 4th Century Greek artist responsible for the Diskobulus have felt about his work being reproduced as a flat image, in colour, some 2,400 years after his death? Or indeed, having his work reproduced on paper, in colour, in a magazine circulated to thousands of people, so that one of these could then fax to me a copy of the image, to be photographed onto a slide, to be projected onto a screen, in front of us here. I wonder. How the artworks currently being made into a permanent artefact in CD-ROM form be mediated to audiences in the 44th Century, 2,400 years from now.” From the end of the paper, CD-ROM - the 21st Century Bronze?, given by Mike Leggett at the Intersections’94 Conference.
6. ‘...the bairdboard bombardment...’ illustration by Greg O’Connor on page 39 of 21C magazine #2 1995 of an article by the same name by Darren Tofts.
7. A Digital Rhizome (1994): image from interactive multimedia CD-ROM : Brad Miller. 8. Anti-Rom (1995) : image from interactive multimedia CD-ROM : SASS group (UK)
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 118 9. 30 Words for the City (1995) : image from interactive multimedia CD- ROM : John Collette.
10. ScruTiny in the Great Round (1995) : image from interactive multime- dia CD-ROM : Jim Gasperini and Tennesee Rice Dixon. (USA).
11. Die Veteranen (1995) : image from interactive multimedia CD-ROM : Stephen Eichorn, Tjark Ihmels, KP Ludwig John, Michael Touma. (Germany)
12. A Digital Rhizome: op.cit.
13. Flora Pentrusularis (1994) :image from interactive multimedia CD-ROM Jean-Louis Boissier. (France)
14. Family Files (1997) : image from interactive multimedia CD-ROM : the image of the clockfaces is a matrix of frames that give access to the various movie file diaries - see illustration numbers 15-16.
15. Family Files (1997) : image from interactive multimedia CD-ROM : the next in the progression from the illustration 14 above.
16. Family Files (1997) : image from interactive multimedia CD-ROM : gradually the clock frames are replaced by full-screen diary images which, at their end, return to the clock faces in the sequence 14-16.
17. Planet of Noise (1998) : image from interactive multimedia CD-ROM : Brad Miller and Ken Wark.
18. Planet of Noise (1998) : image from interactive multimedia CD-ROM : Brad Miller and Ken Wark.
19. Waxweb (1989-95) : screen grab from Web browser image David Blair.
20. Waxweb (1989-95) : screen grab from Web browser image David Blair.
21. Waxweb (1989-95) : screen grab from Web browser image (detail) : David Blair.
22. Waxweb (1989-95) : screen grab from Web browser image : David Blair.
23. Waxweb (1989-95) : screen grab from Web browser image : David Blair.
24. Beyond (1997) : series of images from the interactive multimedia CD- ROM, as reproduced in a layout in World Art #18 : Zoe Beloff.
25. Burning the Interface
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 119 26. Espaces Interactif Europe exhibit curated by Annick Bureaud, Paris, 1996.
27. Burning the Interface
28. Burning the Interface
29 Burning the Interface
30. Burning the Interface
31. Imaginary Landscape #8 (1997) : an image composited by Mike Leggett in Photoshop using an image made with an Apple 150 digital camera, one of the first digital cameras to be retailed. With this camera, images were gathered for inclusion in the two seed-funding project proposals to the AFC, including this one from a series called Imaginery Landscapes.
32. Voyage de la Corvette l’Astrolabe, Historie, Atlas 1, Plate 34, Paris 1833. Lithograph by Victor-Jean Adam, based on drawings by Louis Auguste de Sainson.
33. Corroboree (1888 est), is one of several drawings that are seen in SonteL by the artist Ulladullah Mickey, (or Willy the Cripple), and are the earliest known artworks by a South Coast Aboriginal which incor- porate traditional European techniques, such as in this picture, employing pen, ink, crayon and pastel on surveyor’s paper. (Organ 1990)
34. The creek bridge location from SonteL (1999), CD-ROM prototype.
35 Crown Property - the arrow head : from SonteL (1999) CD-ROM proto- type.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 120 Acknowledgments Deborah Ely; Bonita Ely (no relation!); David Watson; Linda Michael; Louise Pether; Bernice Murphy & Leon Paroissien; Bill Seaman, Professor Liz Ashburn and those other artists and flaneurs who shared the resource of the Research Lab at the College of Fine Arts, the University of New South Wales; Michael Hill and Kate Ingham at the Australian Film Commission; the directors and staff at the venues who participated in the tour of Burning the Interface
It is dedicated to the countless artists who are burning their eyes out staring for long hours at the incandescent phosphor screen that conveys their joyful images and illuminating imaginations.
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 121 Index
2D works 67 Cinema of the Everyday, The 19 30 Words for the City (1995) 30 Cinemedia 73 3D objects 67 Colette, John 30 collective intelligence 36 A Thousand Plateaus 32 computer-aided-design / CAD-CAM 22, 67 Aartnet 15 conceptual garden 69 Anemaet, Leon 39 Conomos, John 16, 45 Anti-ROM (1995) 30 contemporary artists 57 Ars Electronica Centre 62 Content 22 Art Gallery of New South Wales 20 Continuum 19 Art Gallery of Western Australia 59 convergence 22 Art Science Technology Network Inc 62 Cooperative Multimedia Centres 34 artificial life 67 Creative Nation 64 Arts Council of England 62 Curators 59 arts professionals 60 cyber space 72 Ascott, Professor Roy 58 Cyberflesh Girlmonster (1995) 15, 33 Ashburn, Prof. Liz 7 Cyborgs, Avatars, Agents 68 Australia Online 16 Australian Film Commission 13, 17 Dartington Arts Centre 19 Multimedia Conference: the Film-maker Dawn of Cinema Conference. See RealTime /15 and Multimedia 14 de Lorenzo, Peter 31 New Image Research 13, 19 De-Lux’O 30 Australian Network for Art & Technology 13 deconstructed film 11 Australian underground film 19 Deleuze and Guattari 32 Australia’s Funniest Home Video Show 10 Dement, Linda 33, 38 desktop 27 Bairdboard Bombardment, The 34 Die Veteranan (1995) 31 Baltz, Lewis 54 Die Veteranen (group) 31 Barminski - Consumer Product (1994) 30 digital communities 68 Baudelaire 50 Digital Media & Interactive Media Festival, Los Because I Am King 19 Angeles 38 Beloff, Zoe 36, 50 Digital Rhizome (1994) 17 Benjamin, Walter 36 digital special effects 68 Beyond (1997) 36. See also World Art No.18; 50 digital video 68 Blair, David 36, 43 Dixon, Rachel 73 Blind Rom (1992) 30 dLux Media Arts 13 Blue (1992) 56 Doors of Perception I 38 Bode, Stephen 62 Duchamp, Marcel 28 Boissier, Jean-Louis 33 DVD 26 Brecht, Bertolt 11, 48 Broadband Services Group 16 Encyclopedia of Clamps, The (1997) 30 Bureaud, Annick 62 epic theatre 12 Burning the Interface Exeter College of Art 19
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 122 expanded cinema 11 International Directory of Electronic Arts (IDEA) Experimenta (Melbourne) 13 62 Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers, The(1994) 20 International Symposium for Electronic Art 1996 61 Fahrenheit 451 (1954) 70 Internet Classification Bill 26 Family Files (1997) 36 internet service providers 45 Feuillade, Louis 51 Intersections95 34 Film & TV Institute 13 Jarman, Derek 56 Film and Video Umbrella 62 Joyce, James 28 FineArt Forum 62 Flora Petrinsularis (1994) 33 Kerkhove, Derrick de 36 fogyist commentators 58 Kreckler, Derek 41 France Tour Detour Deux Enfants (1978) 19 Frankham, Noel 59 La Jetee 43 French Ministry of Culture 62 L’Anné derniére á Marienbad 54 Frontiers of Utopia (1996). 62 Latham, William 39 Laurel, Brenda 28 game and arcade Consuls 66 Lesy, Michael 54 games market 68 Lichtenberg, Georg 53 Gasperini, Jim and Dixon, Tennesee Rice 31 Llosa, Mario Vargas 14 Gee, Jason 41 London Arts Lab 9 Gibson, Ross 37 London Electronic Arts 18 Godard, Jean-Luc 11 London Film-Makers’ Co-op 9, 18 Goldiggers (1980) 19 Lovelock, Aurora 72 government departments 61 graphical user interface (GUI) 22, 27 Macintosh (computer) 26 Greenfield, Sophie and Rollestone, Giles 30 Mandelbrot, Benoit 41 Griffith Artworks 73 Marker, Chris 43 Griffith Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Marx, Karl 19 Gulf War 32 22 McKinnon, Stewart 19 Media Resource Centre 13 Hill, Michael 19 Mediamatic 36, 38 Home of the Brave (-) 59 mediascape 31 HTML 44 Mercer, Colin 22 hybrid installations 69 Metro Arts 13 hyperlinking 45 Michael, Linda 17, 64 hypermedia 6 Microwave Festival 36 hypertext 5 Miles, Adrian 53 Miller, Brad 17, 40 Image Con Text: One 19 Modern Image Makers Association (MIMA) 13, Image ConText : One & Two 58 see also Experimenta immersive 24, 28 modernist 11 Independent Film-makers Association (IFA) 73 MOO 49 industrialisation 18 multimedia 22, 23 information superhighway 44 multimedia art 23, 61 installation work 66 multimedia artists 24 integrated film practice 18 multimedia computer 26 Interaction 57 Multimedia Forums 14 interactive 28 multimedia Industry 60 interactive CD-ROM 50 multimedia work 58 interactive multimedia 22, 24, 38, 57 Munsterberg, Hugo 50 interface 24, 27, 28 Murray, Dr Kevin 66
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 123 Museum of Contemporary Art 17 Scott, Jill 62 Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongerewa 70 ScruTiny in the Great Round (1995) 31 Museum of Sydney 19 Seaman, Bill 7, 20 Myst (1993) 14 Seyrig, Delphine 48 SHOCK + listserv 66 National Diploma in Art & Design 19 Site-Time-Media-Space 70 new images 14 Skin of Culture, The 53, see also RealTime/11 New Media Forum 20 Smith, Trevor 59 new media practice 67 social infrastructure 61 new tools 15 Soppela, Mari 36 Nickelodeon 52 South West Arts 19 sponsorship 60 On-line exhibitions 66 Story of Waxweb, The (1989-96) 36 Storyscape 46 Palmer, Brendan 41 studio practice 67 Penny, Simon 14 - 16 Sydney Intermedia Network 13 see also dLux performance 69 Media Arts performance art 67 Performance Space 17 Te Papa 70. See also Museum of New Zealand, Pether, Louise 63 Te Papa Tongerewa Phantasmagoria (MCA exhibition) 70 telematic networks 57 Photo-CD 43 Third International Symposium of Electronic Art Photofile No.45 36. See also Story of Waxweb, (TISEA) 13, 45 Photofile No.52 36. See also Planet of Noise tip-sheets 64 Planet of Noise (1997) 36, 40 See Photofile N52 Tofts, Darren 6, 28 Point of Sale (1992), 15 politicians 60 University of New South Wales 13 post-modern 69 College of Fine Arts 13 Potter, Sally 19 Urban Feedback (1997) 30
Quicktime 65 van der Kaap, Gerald 30 QuickTime VR 52 Venetian Deer (1997) 31 video art 13, 23 RealTime /15 ‘Past Presence’. See Dawn of VRML 49, 66 Cinema Conference RealTime/11 53. See Skin of Culture, The Walker Art Centre 66 Red Dress and like ice like fire- (1997) 31 Wark, Mackenzie 40 Reflections, Abstractions and Memory Structures Warner, Gary 19 (RAMS) (1994) 31 Watson, David 73 reflexivity 29 - 31 WAX or the discovery of television among the Resnais, Alain 54 bees (1979) 45 Riley, Vicky 15 WAXWEB 43 Robert Street Arts Lab 18 Wedde, Ian 70 Rousseau 33 Windows 26, 65 Roussel 52 World Art No.18 36. See also Beyond (1997) Rowan, Colin 63 World Wide Web 15, 26, 44, 65 Writing 68 SASS 30 Schama, Simon 58 Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien (ZKM) 62 Schofield, Tim 38 Schwartz, Hans Peter 62
Burning the Interface - Leggett - 1999 - COFA UNSW page 124